12-27-12 – On the windswept beach at Breezy Point on Thursday afternoon, the researcher cut a small, raw cube out of the side of the giant whale, deposited the morsel in a vial of formaldehyde and screwed the cap shut. It was a messy job.
“The whale is still full of blood,” the researcher, Julika Wocial, explained, “even though it’s dead.”
What began as a post-Christmas drama — the sighting of an endangered finback whale, breathing, just barely, as it floundered in the surf of Rockaway Inlet in Queens on Wednesday – became a grim procedural march after the mammal died overnight.
Read the complete story from The New York Times.