of Edinburgh, Session 1881-82. 
443 
The following Communications were read 
2. On a Specimen of Sowerby’s Whale ( Mesoplodon bidens) 
captured in Shetland. By Professor Turner. 
Sowerby’s whale is one of the rarest of the cetacea which frequent 
the British seas. It was first recognised as a distinct species by Mr. 
Janies Sowerby, from a specimen cast ashore in 1800 on the coast of 
Elgin, and named by him Phy setter bidens .* * * § Erom that time to the 
present no properly authenticated specimen has been obtained in 
Scotland, although it is not unlikely that a skull in the Museum of 
Science and Art in this city, a description of which I gave to this 
Society in 1872, f may have belonged to an animal captured in the 
Scottish seas. Two, if not three, specimens have been obtained on 
the Irish coast, but I know of no example of this whale having been 
caught in England. In my former communication to this Society, 
I referred to two specimens taken in France (Havre, Calvados), one 
at Ostend, one on the coast of Norway, and one on the coast of 
Sweden, and this completed the record of this animal so far as I 
could find a reference in zoological literature. I was not aware at 
that time that a specimen had been stranded on Nantucket Island, 
Massachusetts, U.S., about the year 1867, and that the cranium 
was in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard College.^ 
The animal was said to be new to America. 
More recently, § Professor Reinhardt of Copenhagen has described 
* Sowerby’s British Miscellany of New or Bare Animals, vol. i. p. 1, 
1806. 
t “On the occurrence of Zipihius cavirostris in the Shetland seas, and a 
comparison of its skull with that of Sowerby’s Whale,” Trans. Boy. Soc. Edin., 
vol. xxvi. 
+ See reference by Prof. Agassiz, in Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Nov. 16, 
1867. Mr. J. A. Allen, “ Catalogue of the Mammals of Massachusetts,” in 
Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, vol. i., 
1863-1869, p. 205. MM. Van Beneden and Gervais, Osteographie des Cetaces, 
p. 396. 
§ Prof. Van Beneden referred, in Bull . de V Acad. Boy. de Belgique, Fevrier, 
1880, tom. xlix., to a female cetacean captured in December 1879 at Hillion, on 
the w T est coast of France (Cotes du Nord), which, from the description sent to 
him, might, he thought, be either Ziphius cavirostris or Mesoplodon sowerbyi. 
VOL. XI, 3 L 
