In 1908, as an eager young assistant at the Museum, Roy Chapman Andrews got an opportunity that would transform his career as a field naturalist: a chance to travel the world studying whales.
Museum Trustee George S. Bowdoin had donated $10,000—about $250,000 today—for the study and collection of cetaceans, the group of marine mammals that includes whales, dolphins, and porpoises.
In later years, Andrews—who was the Director of the Museum from 1935 to 1942—would be best known for his 1920s fossil hunting expeditions to the Gobi Desert in Central Asia. (There, his team discovered many new mammal and dinosaur fossils, including the first nests of dinosaur eggs.)
But as a young man, he was first and foremost interested in whales–including beaked whales, an elusive group that comprises about a quarter of all whale species.
“There was never a more virgin field for an enthusiastic young naturalist,” Andrews would later write. Before the advent of whale hunting by steam-powered ships, starting in the late 1860s, researchers had no way to observe these fast-moving marine mammals in their native habitat. Even in the early 1900s, joining a whaling voyage was virtually the only way to study the animals while they were alive.
And so Bowdoin’s donation launched Andrews “on a career of blubber and brine which lasted for eight years and carried [him] twice around the world,” to whaling ships and stations in Canada, Alaska, Japan, and more.
But even during Andrews’ extensive travels he encountered no living beaked whales. The only evidence he observed of the existence of these mammals–which can reach 42 feet long and weigh thousands of pounds—was circumstantial and episodic. In 1910 in Japan, Andrews saw a photograph of a Baird’s beaked whale (Berardius bairdii), the largest of all beaked whales, proof that this rare species swam there, too, and not justoff the coast of Alaska as was thought. Once, later on, he was able to examine the skeleton of a beaked whale (Mesoplodon densirostris)that had beached along the shoreline of New Jersey.
Most surprising, it was at home, in the Museum’s own collections, that he discovered a new species of beaked whale. Found in 1904 in New Zealand, the skeleton of a small whale had been transported to the American Museum of Natural History.
Andrews named the new species Mesoplodon bowdoini in honor of the trustee who funded his whale work.