February 17, 2021 — In early 2019, a massive whale carcass washed up on a tourist beach in the Florida Everglades. The whale, measuring nearly 37 feet from tip to tail, was a rare Bryde’s (pronounced broodus) whale.
When Dr. Michael McGowen, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and John Ososky, a museum specialist at the museum, heard about the corpse, they jumped on the phone to convince the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to help preserve the whale.
NOAA agreed and later that year, the whale skeleton made its journey to the Smithsonian, where it is now a part of the National Museum of Natural History’s marine mammal collection. McGowen and Ososky knew from the beginning that this whale was going to be an important specimen. But, at the time, they didn’t know just how important.
In a paper published in the journal Marine Mammal Science in January, scientists discovered that the Smithsonian’s specimen is a new species related to the Bryde’s whale, making the skeleton a holotype — the specimen used to describe and define a species for the first time. The research team named the species Rice’s Whale (Balaenoptera ricei) after the prominent marine mammal biologist Dr. Dale Rice.