Spade-toothed whale
species of beaked whale
The spade-toothed whale (Mesoplodon traversii) is the rarest species of beaked whale. Only seven confirmed specimens have ever been found, over the timespan from 1872 to 2024. All seven were found in the South Pacific—six in New Zealand and one in Chile. Very little is known about the species.
Discovery
The whale was discovered from a lower jaw with teeth found by naturalist Henry Travers on Pitt Island in the Chatham Islands of New Zealand in 1872. James Hector, the director of the Colonial Museum, reported the jaw in an 1873 paper on the whales and dolphins of New Zealand, thinking it a specimen of strap-toothed whale (Dolichodon layardii), which had been described by British Museum zoologist John Edward Gray in 1865 from a South African specimen. Gray, in an 1874 response, doubted Hector's identification and thought the jaw likely from a new species, which he provisionally named Dolichodon traversii in honor of Travers, the collector. Hector was not persuaded though and insisted in an 1878 article that it was the jaw of a strap-toothed whale, which by then had been renamed Mesoplodon layardi.
A damaged calvaria (the top of the skull) was found washed up on Robinson Crusoe Island, Chile, in 1993 and was described as a new species, Mesoplodon bahamondi or Bahamonde's beaked whale. A calvaria found at White Island in New Zealand in the 1950s went unidentified for about 40 years, until in 1999 it was identified as being from a ginkgo-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon ginkgodens).
The public source identifies “Spade-toothed whale” as species of beaked whale. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Spade-toothed, whale and species.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q27929. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1872, 2024, 1873 and 1865.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spade-toothed whale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.