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Research geneticist Patricia Rosel needed to visit a skeleton-packed warehouse to confirm a longstanding scientific hunch: The 40-foot-long mammals in the Gulf of Mexico weren’t Bryde’s whales, but a new species altogether.
“It was a little bit surreal,” Rosel says of her trip to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s offsite collections in Maryland. There, she perused dozens of rows of bone-filled cabinets and 9-foot-tall whale skulls secured on carts before inspecting the skeleton of a baleen whale that washed up on a Florida beach in 2019.
Rosel, who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, arrived on a mission: to determine whether certain physical characteristics of the rogue whale distinguish it from related Bryde’s whales, which live around the world.
Patricia Rosel helped assemble the ...
