Recently, kilometers from its native environment in Brazil’s remote forest, scavenger vultures notified local officials with their screechings, leading to the discovery of a 36-foot-long whale—yes, a whale.
The Amazon rainforest is teeming with life, as is well known, yet a recent finding confounded even seasoned biologists and wildlife experts. In the undergrowth of Brazil’s Marajó Island, they found nothing less than the carcass of a 10-ton humpback whale.
Preliminary theories suggest that the whale washed ashore during a storm or that it was already dead when rising tides carried it on land. Scientists are baffled as to how it got so far inland and why it was even swimming off the shore of Marajó.
