A dead whale around 50 feet long was found washed up on a Long Island beach, authorities say, with the dead sea creature drawing a small crowd of onlookers.
The whale found on the beach in Smith Point County Park in Suffolk County was a male finback whale, experts with the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation said.
The nonprofit group based on Long Island rescues and rehabilitates marine mammals.
Finback whales are considered the world's second-largest whale species after blue whales. The animal washed up a few hundred yards from a park pavilion, just outside a campground, authorities said.
How the whale, which was found early Thursday morning, died is unclear, the marine research group said, but noted a dead sea turtle, possibly a leatherback, was also found washed up not far from where the whale was discovered. However, the two discoveries are likely unrelated, the group said.
Experts were conducting tests to determine if the whale had been ill or possibly the victim of a collision with a ship.
The creature showed signs of advanced decomposition, suggesting it had been dead for some time before washing up on the beach.
It displayed no visible signs of injury, Kimberly Durham of the Riverhead Foundation said.
In recent months there have been frequent sightings of finback whales off eastern Long Island, she said.
On Monday a dead finback whale had been spotted floating about 30 miles from Jones Beach, which is south of Smtih Point in Nassau County, but it was unclear if the beached whale was the same animal, authorities said.
Finback whales are listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened throughout their range of coastal water in all the Earth's major oceans.
The social animals are often seen in small groups, and the large, fast-swimming filter feeders have only one natural predator, the killer whale.
They can live to between 80 and 90 years of age.
Authorities said they were making arrangements to have the whale removed from the beach amid fears of the carcass "exploding," as has sometimes happened in the past with bloated whales decomposing on beaches.
A buildup of gases within a decomposing carcass is normal, experts say.
"Pressure release is sometimes slow, and sometimes catastrophic," says Bruce Mate, director of the marine biology institute at Oregon State University who has dealt with a lot of dead whales in his time. "The gas buildup is just a normal part of the degradation of tissue."
