Huge skull found on Outer Banks came from creature that can weigh 40 tons, park says

A large, creepy looking skull fragment washed out of the Atlantic Ocean this week on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

It was roughly 3 feet wide and 2 feet tall, and showed up on Hatteras Island just south of Salvo.

That’s within Cape Hatteras National Seashore, so the National Park Service took charge and concluded it was the “cranial cavity” of a sea creature that can reach 60 feet in length and weigh 40 tons.

“Take a look at this large portion of a humpback whale skull,” the park wrote in a May 15 Facebook post.

“Humpback whales ... have specialized skull structures to support their unique feeding behaviors. Their skulls are relatively flexible, especially around the jaw joints, which enables them to open their mouths wide to consume large volumes of water and prey. The also have mandibles (lower jaws) that are not fused to their skulls.”

It’s not uncommon for the park to allow such things to find their way back into the ocean. However, whale cranial cavities skulls aren’t easy to find, so the park collected the specimen and intends to use it “for educational purposes.”

The location of the Outer Banks makes the coastline “a hotspot for marine mammal activity,” experts say.

“At any given time, a wide arrangement of marine mammals move-about and feed very close to Cape Hatteras beaches, influenced by the southern Gulf Stream and the northern Labrador Current colliding off our coast,” park officials wrote.

“The barrier island chains extend into the Atlantic Ocean and come in very close proximity to the continental shelf, and for this reason a large number of (whale) strandings occur within park boundaries.”

Thirty humpback whales have died along North Carolina’s coast since 2016, including two this year, according to NOAA Fisheries. That number includes whales that got stranded and died on N.C. beaches and those found floating dead in the Atlantic.

Some died after being hit by ships while others succumbed after spending an extended time entangled in fishing gear, experts say.

This story was originally published May 16, 2024 at 8:01 AM with the headline "Huge skull found on Outer Banks came from creature that can weigh 40 tons, park says."