Scientists Capture First Living Glimpse of a Whale Once Known Only By Its Remains
The morning began quietly off Baja California. Light wind. Open water. Then two dark shapes surfaced beside the Pacific Storm, and a routine research day changed in seconds. The animals were small. Sleek. Elusive. And they kept vanishing beneath the swell.
For five years, researchers had searched the region for the source of a mysterious acoustic signal. Marine biologists had tracked the call, known as BW43, across deep canyons and remote offshore corridors. When the pair appeared, the team recognized a rare chance to confirm the identity of one of the ocean’s least-known whales. As The Guardian reports, a small tissue sample taken with a specialized arrow would later reveal what they had hoped for: the first living ginkgo-toothed beaked whales ever documented at sea.
Photo: YouTube / Science News
The ginkgo-toothed beaked whale had never been seen alive before this expedition.
A Species Known Only From the Dead
Until this moment, the species’ existence at sea was only assumed. Past knowledge came from carcasses that had drifted onto beaches in Japan and other parts of the Indo-Pacific, as detailed by Interesting Animals. These records mapped a broad distribution stretching from Sri Lanka to California, but none provided insight into how the whales behaved in life.
The whales had looked ordinary at a distance. Up close, the male’s single erupted tooth—a ginkgo-leaf shape embedded in the jaw—revealed the species’ identity. That anatomical detail, noted across strandings for decades, had finally been seen in the open ocean.
Photo: YouTube / Science News
Scientists confirmed the species using a minimally invasive tissue sample.
Five Years, Two Whales, One Confirmation
The tissue sample enabled the first genetic verification of a living animal, a milestone described by Outdoors. Scientists had suspected the BW43 call belonged to this species, but only DNA could close the case.
The expedition’s tools—hydrophones to track sound, high-powered optics to scan the horizon, and practiced coordination—proved essential for a whale that surfaces for only minutes at a time. These whales are deep divers. Shy. Sensitive to noise. They flee when approached by boats. That behavior, noted by multiple researchers, explains why sightings at sea have remained absent for decades.
A New Window Into a Hidden Life
The identification also expands the species’ known habitat. Although past strandings clustered around the western Pacific, analysis of acoustic data suggests that ginkgo-toothed beaked whales also inhabit waters from northern Baja to California, a finding highlighted by EnviroLink. That realization changes the map of a species once thought to drift unpredictably across oceans.
Little is known about their population size, diet, or migration patterns. Fewer than twenty strandings have ever been recorded. Their conservation status remains Data Deficient. But for the first time, researchers can study the species as a living animal rather than a biological mystery washed ashore.
A sighting that lasted only hours now forms the foundation for years of new science.
