This whale species is so rare it's never been seen alive. A dissection may decode its mysteries

The spade-toothed whale is the world’s rarest whale, with only seven of its kind ever spotted. Almost nothing is known about the enigmatic species.

It is the world’s rarest whale, with only seven of its kind ever spotted. Almost nothing is known about the enigmatic species. But on Monday a small group of scientists and cultural experts in New Zealand clustered around a near-perfectly preserved spade-toothed whale hoping to decode decades of mystery.

“I can’t tell you how extraordinary it is,” said a joyful Anton van Helden, senior marine science adviser for New Zealand’s conservation agency, who gave the spade-toothed whale its name to distinguish it from other beaked species. “For me personally, it’s unbelievable.”

Van Helden has studied beaked whales for 35 years, but Monday was the first time he has participated in a dissection of the spade-toothed variety. In fact, the careful study of the creature -- which washed up dead on a New Zealand beach in July — is the first ever to take place.

None has ever been seen alive at sea.

The list of what scientists don’t know about spade-toothed whales is longer than what they do know. They don’t know where in the ocean the whales live, why they’ve never been spotted in the wild, or what their brains look like. All beaked whales have different stomach systems and researchers don’t know how the spade-toothed kind processes its food. They don’t know how this one died.

Over the next week, researchers studying the five-metre-long male at an agricultural research centre near the city of Dunedin hope to find out.

“There may be parasites completely new to science that just live in this whale,” said van Helden, who thrilled at the chance of learning how the species produces sound and what it eats. “Who knows what we’ll discover?”