A new species of beaked whale has just been described from the Pacific Ocean.
A caracass floated ashore in June of 2014, in the Pribilof Islands community of St. George, in the middle of Alaska's Bering Sea. A biology teacher spotted the carcass half-buried in sand on a desolate windswept beach and alerted a former fur seal researcher who presumed, at first, that she knew what they'd found a Baird's beaked whale. But according to new research published this week, that this was not a Baird's beaked whale at all, but an entirely new species—a smaller, odd-shaped black cetacean that Japanese fishermen have long called karasu, or raven.
See the full story here:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/07/new-whale-species/
Interestingly our colleague Wojtek Bachara in Poland, who we regularly contact to assist in identification of beaked whales informs us that there are several stranding records in japan, Russia, South Korea and at least three in Alaska. There is also a video of a group at sea off North Japan. So not new to Japanese fishers or their scientific community, just not formally described.
All very interesting, maybe there is a new species of beaked whale off Ireland ??