A large, terrifying skull fragment – with two rows of jagged, tooth-like edges – washed up on the shoreline of North Carolina’s Outer Banks this week.
Representatives of the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), which maintains this Atlantic coastal area, reported that the skull fragment measured approximately 3 feet wide and 2 feet high, as it warned citizens against attempts to remove the giant skull.
The skull fragment appeared on Hatteras Island, the namesake of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, south of the village of Salvo, a beach community surrounded by the oceanfront national park.
NPS officials said the fragment was part of a marine animal’s “cranial cavity” and that the animal could grow into 60 feet long and weighs a whopping 40 tons.
The apparently razor-like teeth on the humpback whale’s creepy skull were likely a cut off area that connected the skull to another part of the body, as humpback whales are filter feeders that use a structure called baleen instead of teeth to suck in plankton and algae for their meals
“Look at this large section of a humpback whale skull,” the park wrote in its statement Facebook post from May 15 on Wednesday.
‘Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) have specialized skull structures to support their unique feeding behavior,” park service officials noted.
The apparently razor-like teeth on the skull were much more likely a severed area that connected the skull to another part of the body – as humpback whales are filter feeders that use a protein structure called baleen, instead of teeth, to suck up plankton and algae for their meals.
“Their skulls are relatively flexible, especially around the jaw joints, allowing them to open their mouths widely to consume large amounts of water and prey,” Cape Hatteras park officials said.
“They also have mandibles (mandibles) that are not fused to their skulls,” park officials said, providing a clue as to how the skull became separated from the whale’s mandibles.
As many as 30 humpback whales have died along the North Carolina coast since 2016, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fisheries statistics.
NPS officials attributed this phenomenon to the region’s history of hurricanes and shipwrecks, suggesting that North Carolina’s outer islands and undersea geography can sometimes capture large marine mammals.
“Given their location on the Outer Banks, the barrier island chains extend into the Atlantic Ocean and come very close to the continental shelf,” they said, “and for this reason a large number of strandings occur within the park boundaries.”
But other humpback whales, according to NOAA expertshave died locally as a result of collisions with ships, but also from fatal encounters in which they became entangled in fishing gear.
Park officials tried to warn citizens against attempts to grab the impressive skull fragment as a personal trophy.
“Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, it is illegal to possess parts of the carcass and/or bones of marine mammals,” they said.
“If NPS finds them, if we can use them for education/research, we will do so (which requires multiple staff members!),” they continued, “or they will be removed and discarded or buried back into the environment.”
Park officials encouraged the public to report sightings of marine mammal strandings or sea turtle sightings to the Cape Hatteras Stranding Hotline: 252-216-6892.