Ziphius

About Ziphius

Ziphius holds a single species, and it was described from the dead. Georges Cuvier examined a fragmentary skull from the French Mediterranean coast in 1823, concluded from its density that it belonged to an extinct animal, and named it accordingly; it was another half-century before the species was recognised as alive and common.

It is the most cosmopolitan of the beaked whales, present in deep water in every ocean except the high polar seas, and the one most likely to be encountered. Older males turn pale, sometimes almost white about the head, and carry heavy scarring from the two tusks at the tip of the lower jaw.

Tagged animals have produced the two records that define what a breath-holding mammal can do: a dive of nearly three thousand metres, and a dive lasting three hours and forty-two minutes. The species is also the one most consistently implicated in mass strandings coincident with naval sonar exercises, and is the focus of most research into that link.