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A peculiar whale skeleton is included fortuitously in the sci-fi movie Hunter Prey

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American



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It’s funny how things work out. We looked recently at a ‘mystery’ whale carcass from Baja California. As explained here, it turned out to be a Risso’s dolphin Grampus griseus. I recently watched a 2009 sci-fi movie called Hunter Prey. Should you wish to know more about it, the wikipedia article is pretty good. Anyway, at a few points in the movie, we see the skeleton of what is evidently a living species of cetacean (and not, as I suppose we’re meant to think, that of some weird alien beast). In best hi-tech fashion, I took a few photos of my TV screen, and the images you see here are the result.

There are quite a few places in the world - mostly coastal deserts - where you can go and see sun-bleached cetacean skeletons, lying in the same places where they were deposited in decades or even centuries past. Hunter Prey includes a reference to the ‘Baja dunes’ in the end credits, and wikipedia says that it was filmed in Mexico. Anyway - your task: identify the species we see in the movie. I include a cropped image of its skull.

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com!

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