Whale of a tale puzzle cleared up
Bizarre find not a dinosaur
IT was to be the Far North’s prehistoric find of the century, until a telltale hessian bag revealed it to be something far, far weirder.
The bag had been buried underneath the giant bones of the mystery animal, an animal that, up to that point, had been believed to be something prehistoric.
Something supposedly preserved for thousands of years, perfectly, in the clay soil.
But then, as James Cook University geoscientist Peter Whitehead kept digging in the 2m-deep pit, his pick axe chiselled away a clump of soil, exposing the fibres of an unmistakeable white bag.
The scientist paused, possibly thinking he was participating in a very elaborate April Fool’s Day prank.
The contractor, who had excavated the “dinosaur” skeleton only three days earlier while trying to remove a troublesome tree trunk, jumped into the pit to help.
Clearing away more of the dirt, he was able to extract the suspect bag from the earth. It came away with ease, and with it, small chunks of a whitish-pink material.
The contractor picked up one of the chunks, lifting it to his nose and giving it a sniff.
“That’s blubber, that – you can smell it,” he said, offering it to three of us, including a photographer, who had gathered around the pit.
If this was blubber, then the bones belonged to a large sea mammal. And judging by the condition of the bag, a modern one at that.
But it therefore begged the question: How on earth did a whale find its way from the ocean to Kuranda?
Rare sighting
THE story begins, remarkably, almost two decades ago.
About 8am on August 24, 2000, a small whale was spotted in distress in Trinity Bay, 2km from shore.
The 8m-long whale, which was initially thought to be a dwarf minke, was later identified as a rare Bryde’s whale, never before reported in Cairns waters.
After the four-tonne female beached herself on the mudflats of Trinity Inlet at low tide, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service rangers worked to try to rescue her.
Tragically, the whale died on the beach a few hours later.
Sandra Clague, who was working as a veterinarian for the wildlife service at the time, was tasked with determining the whale’s cause of death.
Ms Clague, who has since retired, said she was shocked to find the marine mammal had died after ingesting a large amount of plastic.
“It was completely jammed in her stomach,” she said.
The Bryde’s whale did not die in vain; the animal’s tragic death became a powerful educational tool about the dangers of littering at sea.
“The whale was cleaned up and mounted in a big perspex box and (QPWS) did a great big poster of it and it went around to all the boat shows, showing people what happens when plastic flies off your boat, or if rubbish goes into waterways, what will happen,” she said.
Ms Clague said she was unclear of what had happened to the whale’s corpse after that, other than the Museum of Tropical Queensland requested the animal’s head, due to the relative rareness of the species in local waters.
Burial place
WHEN authorities needed somewhere to discard the large carcass of a whale they contacted Jake Pelling, who owns the 67ha property at Kuranda now known as The Billabong.
The whale was strapped on to the back of a semi-trailer and shipped up the Kuranda Range into the rainforest.
The “grave” was near a large tree, which later became a major obstruction for campers looking for the perfect place to pitch a tent at the popular campground.
Mr Pelling, who had been away on a fishing trip in Cape York for most of this week, said he just laughed when he came
back into range and was told the whale had been uncovered on his property.
“I thought about the whale every now and then but, you know, you get too busy,” he said.
What a buzz
WHEN photos of the then-mystery animal’s bones were sent to JCU on Monday by the
Cairns Post, the university’s geosciences department was buzzing with excitement.
Initially the bones were pegged as belonging to a megafaunal animal from the Pleistocene era, about 10,000 years old.
JCU’s fossil experts wanted to know exactly where the dis- covery had been made and whether they could dispatch one of their experts to the site immediately
Mr Whitehead was noticeably dismayed that the bones did not belong to some prehistoric creature but was still amazed by what had been unearthed, completely by chance, in the rainforest.