“Keep it to the right, a little lower, that’s it, that’s it.” My heart is in my throat as I watch what looks like an alien spacecraft being lifted out of the ground, swaying precariously in mid-air. We’re in a remote field in Cornwall digging up a whale’s head that’s the length of a minibus – one of the more unusual jobs I’ve done in my journalistic career.
It was 2022 when I first heard whispers about a whale head buried somewhere near Falmouth, but, like everyone else, I thought it was simply an urban myth. As a journalist, all sorts of stories fall on my desk and it’s my job to check them out, but it was only when another whale was stranded on a popular tourist beach about a year later that I started to take this story seriously. Little did I know I’d end up not only finding but digging up the whale’s head. So where did the skull come from? And why was it there?
On a winter’s day in 2020, a 20-metre fin whale – which are the second largest animals to have ever lived – became stranded on a remote beach on the south coast of Cornwall. The local community battled to save the young female and were devastated when she later died.
Also on the beach that day was local professor and ecologist Robbie McDonald (now chief scientist for the Office of Environmental Protection). Rather than see the whale’s carcass disposed of through incineration or rendering (converting waste animal tissue into usable materials), he negotiated with the landowner to take part of the whale – the skull.
“I thought it would be a terrible waste and maybe we could get this whale onto the university where there’s a focus on marine and environmental education, so we could use it for teaching, but also as a sort of memorial to these incredible creatures that sometimes wash up on our coastlines,” says Professor McDonald.
Cetaceans – whales, porpoises and dolphins – are protected species and only scientists with a special licence from Natural England are allowed to take their bones.
The whale skull was transported to the University of Exeter where it was buried in a field on their Cornwall campus. Although unusual, burying bones is a process sometimes used by museums to help prepare specimens for display and study. It accelerates the process of decomposition, helping to clean the bones. The whole event took place just before lockdown; the whale was buried quietly and discreetly out of respect for this majestic creature.
As well as taking possession of the head, McDonald also took the whale’s baleen plates. Baleen whales are filter feeders; instead of teeth they have large plates that hang down from their upper jaw like the teeth in a comb. A selection of these plates from a variety of different strandings are now being tested at the University of Exeter. They are made from keratin, the same substance as our hair and nails, and because they continually grow and wear down, they hold a chemical timeline of where the animal has been and what it has been feeding on.
University of Exeter marine biologist Kate Chadwick is building up a picture of what may have happened to these multiple strandings in the last few years of their lives. “The real detective work begins when I compare these chemical fingerprints with local environmental data – things like sea surface temperature, marine heatwaves, harmful algal blooms – and from there we can work out how changing ocean conditions are affecting marine predators,” says Chadwick. “This work isn’t just about science – it’s about conservation, connection and listening to what the ocean is telling us.”
My attempts to discover the exact location of the buried whale head led me to numerous dead ends – and a variety of curious Cornish characters, which resulted in my six-part podcast about our emotional and scientific relationship with whales. But eventually it was my partner, Stuart (Professor Stuart Bearhop, to give him his full title) who busted the myth. Stuart works at the university as an ecologist and had learned of its whereabouts when his colleague moved to a new job. To my delight, he was given the task of digging it up.
The excavation of the whale’s head took 10 hours of painstaking work. The team called in to help with the dig had never done anything like it before. Paul White, who usually worked excavating electricity cables and gas pipes, told me he’d googled a whale’s bone structure to help with the process. “I just wanted to see what I was going to be coming up against and how fragile it would be,” says White.
My partner, a burly Scotsman, is usually unflappable but even he confided “this is really quite nerve-wracking” as the two-tonne whale head was slowly lifted out of its hole and gently rested on a bed of soil, thankfully remaining in one piece.
The skull is now drying out before it will go on display at the university. As McDonald says: “We’ve got a lot to do to clean up our oceans and this skull will be one gargantuan reminder that we need to get on and do it.”
Hear more about the whale and what it can tell us about the natural world in the new podcast series The Whale, Secrets of a Stranding, on BBC Sounds.
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