Hector's head restored

Press, 14 July 1980, Page 2

Hector's head restored

PA Wellington The skull and skeleton of the world’s rarest whale will be reunited after a year’s separation. Dr Allan Baker, a scientist at the National Museum in Wellington, had appealed for information about the whereabouts of this missing head, which belongs to a 4.5 m male Hector’s beaked whale, the skeleton of which was found last year.

The whale was washed ashore near Jack and Jill Bay, in the Bay of Islands.

Dr Baker flew to Russell to examine the whale, but by the time he arrived the tide had washed it away.

He searched the coastline last summer and found the whale’s headless skeleton, partly buried in seaweed and stones. Dr Baker said last Monday that the head could still be somewhere in the, Bay of Islands, and he appealed to the public for information. A few days later he received a call from the Bay of Islands, to say that locals had the skull and jaws. A search had been

mounted in the shallow waters where the body had been found, and the head was found less than 50 metres away.

The skull and jaws will be brought to Wellington, where it will be cleaned, measured, and studied. It will also, of course, be reunited with its body so that a scientific report on the entire whale can be published. Dr Baker, delighted about the prospect of a reunion, said that ; the whale had) probably been decapitated by rocks while floating into shore.

The Hector’s beaked whale is extremely rare; Only eight females from places as widely separated' as southern Africa and New Zealand have been known to . exist, and the body found in the Bay of Islands is, one of only twomales of the species known to science. t Tu The Hector’s beaked whale was first described in 1871 from a specimen stranded at Titahi Bay. It was named after Dr James Hector, at the time director of the Colonial Museum.