NOTES ON A COMMON FIN WHALE. 
205 
Eventually the animal was taken to Bristol. 
The following details as to the external characters and the 
dimensions of this great whale are the result of a careful ex- 
amination of the body since its arrival in that city : — The animal 
was a female of about the average size, the total length of the 
body being 66 ft. The belly (f. the ventral surface of the 
throat and thorax) was traversed by numerous longitudinal 
shallow grooves, parallel to one another, running backward 
from the inner edges of the lower jaw beneath the pectoral fins, 
and ending posteriorly along two lines drawn obliquely from 
beneath the pectorals to a median point ventrally about 9 feet 
behind their termination. Occasionally adjoining grooves blended 
■with one another, uniting obliquely. The colour of the body 
w^as black above, i. e., on the head and jaws, back and sides, 
down to an irregular line passing from beneath the lower jaws 
and the pectoral fins to the termination of the tail ventrally. 
Below, the body was white, namely on the belly and also on the 
abdomen and ventral surface of the tail along a triangular 
shaped area having its apex at the tail-fork. When the whale 
w'as found the white colour of a good deal of the belly region 
was tinged with a deep pink, owing to the rosy-coloured 
epidermis which in this species lines the hollows of the ventral 
plicae. By the time the animal reached Bristol, however, this 
pink colour had entirely disappeared, apparently as a result of 
the decomposition then rapidly progressing. The lateral por- 
tions of the wdiite belly region w^ere mottled with a few large 
irregularly shaped, dark patches, an especially large one lying 
beneath each pectoral. The black colour of the dorsal region 
shaded off gradually into the white below. In the white area 
bordering the dark region there were, in addition to the larger 
patches above mentioned, occasional dark spots and dashes in 
the ventral grooves. In the posterior portion of the body (tail) 
the two diversely coloured regions were more sharply defined. 
