A rare whale jawbone fished out of a Dutch estuary last year will be used for education and display purposes, now that its mysterious history has been revealed.
The man who found the bone in the water, marine biologist Bas van der Sanden, was suspicious. The bone, he felt, was too white and clean to have been in the water for a long time. Further examination showed that it had been treated with preservatives and a DNA test showed it belonged to a species never found in the area.
The truth came out after a man contacted van der Sanden after a lecture at a divers’ convention.
The man had been employed at the Amsterdam Zoological Museum, which closed in 2011; most of its collection went to another museum in Leiden, but a number of items were headed for the scrap heap. The man took them home, and stored the huge jawbone behind his sofa.
Last year, he moved to a smaller home and had no room for the jawbone, but because there was no paperwork, there was nothing he could do with it officially—so he dumped it in the Oosterschelde, allowing it to be officially ‘found’ and registered again. Score: Bureaucracy 0, Clever Plan 1.
