[VIRAL] Huge Skull Found On Jersey Shore Beach Is Actually Minke Whale Skull

A giant skull found by a State Park Police washed ashore the Island Beach State Park, New Jersey intrigued social media users as the skull looks like it was from a Pterodactyl reptile and was unusually huge. For comparison, the giant skull reached the waist of the police officer standing next to it.

Authorities confirmed on Tuesday that the skeleton found along the Jersey shore beach of Barnegat Peninsula belonged to the lower jaw of a minke whale that was believed to have been buried on the same beach last year. The state park think that it must have been washed up to the coastline from the Monday's storm.

"You never know what you are going to find on the beach after a storm," the New Jersey state park posted.

(Photo : Photo: Island Beach State Park Facebook via NBC San Diego)

Identification of the Giant Skull

The photo uploaded by the Island Beach State Park on Facebook sparked several theories and guesses among commenters on the social media. Some hopefully guessed that it was a skull of a pterodactyl or that of a dinosaur. "That's where my Pterodactyl head went!!" A Facebook user jokingly commented with some others who guessed that it was from an extinct winged reptile.

Meanwhile, a commenter online came so close with the assumption that it did look like it belonged to a whale but too small for a humpback whale. Its wide skeleton suggests that it was a close relative to a minke whale, a Balaenoptera acutorostrata.

Authorities have confirmed afterwards that it was indeed the ventral or lower jaw of a minke whale, the smallest of the baleen whales.

The common minke whales typically inhabit the North American waters which have ironically small bodies. The one found in the state park was believed to have been buried near the dune line at Island Beach State Park in June 2020. The founder of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, Bob Schoelkopf said that there's good reason to believe the skull is from a minke whale surfaced from the eroded beach it was buried from after several flooding and changing tides.

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A Common Occurrence Along the New Jersey Coast

Schoelkopf added that the occurrence of these whale species might become more common along the New Jersey coasts. Although minke whales are not considered as endangered, the NOAA Fisheries confirmed that in the recent years, several unusual minke whale mortalities which elevated along the east coast of the U.S. have increased.

For instance, a dying young minke whale once washed ashore at Island Beach State Park sometime in September 2019, and was eventually euthanized. Earlier that year, another juvenile minke whale died after it got caught and was trapped between the docks of the Sandy Hook Bay Marina.

At this time, Schoelkopf hopes to use the unusually largely-intact skull as a learning tool for children at a small museum of the park's interpretive center.

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