Flame821

Well said! Exciting stuff isn’t it? Though I must agree, I may never want to go deep sea fishing again if they find a megladon, or even a leviathan whale! We are scheduled to go to the Cape and deep sea fishing next Monday and Mr Meg will likely be a topic of conversations, along with the great whites and gray seals!

Beaked whales are notoriously difficult to find, as they are extremely shy and elusive. They are known to dive under at the sound of any human activity, such as boats and not resurface until the disturbance is long gone. You could pass right by them and not even know they were there. In addition, they tend to live in areas where there are not many people around to begin with.

As I noted in an article I wrote here fairly recently on Cryptomundo covering this topic, Beaked whales are famously shy and difficult to study. Even researchers actively studying beaked whales rarely see them, and due to this there are many instances of very recently discovered species known from only a handful of specimens and sightings. In many cases, such as with the aforementioned I. pacificus , a living specimen has never been obtained.

As mentioned here, Perrin’s beaked whale (Mesoplodon perrini) for instance, has never been recorded alive. It is known from 5 specimens, the first found in 1975, all found off the coast of California between San Diego and Monterey. It was formally described in 2002. Shepherd’s beaked whale, also known as the Tasman whale, is known from only four specimens. The Pygmy beaked whale (Mesplodon peruvianus) was originally discovered off Peru in 1991 and is known from only twelve specimens. The list goes on.

On another note, I also noted in my article that new species of beaked whales, although the most commonly discovered, are not the only type of new whale being uncovered in the deep.

A Japanese team of researchers identified a new species of baleen whale based on evidence from specimens starting in the 1970s and formally described the new species in 2003. Known now as Balaenoptera omurai, it was the first new species of baleen whale (filter feeding whales) identified in nearly a hundred years.

It illustrates that a large creature can be wary of humans and remain undetected in the deep. Perhaps not only whales, but other types of large sea animals are doing the same thing.

This all reminds me of just how many mysterious animals other than obvious whales have been seen and described by not only seamen or fisherman, but also trained biologists who are still not quite sure what it is they saw. Animals have been described and illustrated by naturalists and biologists in the sea over the years that have never been formally recognized, and remain enigmas.

The seas are a vast and mysterious place, with boundless examples of new discoveries, often of large or surprising animals, being made. The oceans are also constantly showing us unusual evolutionary paths and various oddities. It is in the seas where we have uncovered completely new types of life, for instance extremophiles such as deep sea vent communities almost completely independent of the need for sunlight at all, and sulphur based whale fall communities, creatures which defy some traditional ideas of biology. The sea holds all sorts of opportunities to make weird discoveries.

I’m not sure if it will necessarily be something as “sexy” as Megladon, but one thing is for sure; concerning the next truly groundbreaking big animal discovery, my money would be on the oceans.

Wow, my first characteristic long comment in awhile. With interesting topics like this, I just can’t help myself.

I can promise you, without reservation, that we will find many ‘sea monsters’ and ‘sea serpants’ over the next 5-10 decades. We are going deeper and deeper into the sea and finding more and more amazing creatures.

Although if Megladon DOES still exist I don’t know that I’ll ever go deep sea fishing again. Logic will not help me on this one. I’m slightly phobic of bull sharks and great whites so I can’t imagine what I’d do if the possibility of something THAT huge being underneath the ship rears its head.

But new squids, crabs, fish, whales…constantly finding new species everytime we go under. Its fabulous!!

Well, scientific work in the post-genomic era has changed our view on the relationships between many species that seem all to related from a morphological standpoint.

That’s why I’m sold on sea serpents–still not set on what exactly they are and which they descended from, but I believe that the idea that there is no such thing is way more ridiculous than the fact that there’s still big critters roaming our oceans…and maybe a few lochs and lakes too…