Spade-toothed whale

Description

The Travers mesoplodon ( Mesoplodon traversii ) is a cetacean odontoceto from the Ziphiidae family.A fragment of the jaw of this species was found on the island of Pitt (New Zealand) in 1872,purchased in 1873 by Hector and described the following year by John Edward Gray,who called it Mesoplodon traversii in honor of Henry Hammersley Travers,the collector.This species was initially confused,from the discovery to 1878,with Layard's mesoplodon (Hector 1878,which in fact never considered the finding belonging to a different species).A skullcap found in the '50s on the Isle of White (also in New Zealand) was neglected for years,but was later attributed to a mesoplodon of Nishiwaki (Baker and van Helden 1999).In 1986,a damaged cranium was found beached on the island of Robinson Crusoe (Chile),and was described as belonging to a new species,Mesoplodon bahamondi or mesoplodonte of Bahamonde.The results of the DNA sequence and of the morphological comparisons (van Helden et al.,2002) showed that all three remains belong to the same species,known as M.Traversii.Travers' mesoplodon is considered one of the rarest whales and,until 2012,was one of the least known.Two specimens,mother and small,were found stranded in New Zealand in 2010.Initially the two specimens were attributed to the less rare Gray Mesoplodon species.Only after repeated DNA analysis and studies conducted by Kirsten Thompson of the University of Auckland,two years after their discovery,the two specimens have been identified as belonging to the M.traversii species in an article published in the journal Current Biology.