Weird marine animal carcass identified
A giant weird caracss of a marine animal washed ashore on a remote Indonesian beach, when found was oozing a mysterious red fluid. Experts on marine life have gotten together and told reporters that it is most likely a baleen whale in an advanced state of decomposition.
The decaying body is nearly 50-foot-long (15 meters) and was found lying on Hulung Beach on Seram Island, Indonesia. It was first discovered by 37-year-old local resident Asrul Tuanakota, who initially mistook the creature for a boat.
Alexander Werth, a whale biologist at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia had a few things to say about the carcass which help identify it as a whale.
Two giveaways that point out the creature was a whale, Werth said: were the grooves or throat pleats, and the upper jaw where the two racks of baleen plates which are used to filter out food in the whale's mouth, would have been.
Scientists say that the whale belongs to the genus Balaenoptera, but it's not clear exactly which species it is. They have narrowed the options down to two types of whales, either a Blue whale or a Bryde's whale. In opposition, Alexander Werth keyed in that Bryde's whales are not usually that big. Moe Flannery, the collections manager in ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences chimmed in, it definitely is not a blue a whal but could possible be a fin whale.
