Last week I gave you this skull to try your hand at identifying:

Adam Yates was straight in with the answer, but there were a few other suggestions that were close, but not quite on the nose.

One suggestion was Tursiops, which are the bottlenose dolphins. The length of the skull is about right, but the Common Bottlenose Dolphin has a relatively longer and narrower rostrum, as you can see by comparing the with the image below:

The shape of the mystery skull is perhaps a better match for Risso’s Dolphin, except the rostrum is a bit longer and the premaxilla is narrower than the maxilla in the mystery object when viewed from above, but in the Risso’s Dolphin the premaxilla is a good bit wider. Also, the mystery specimen has way too many teeth.

Another suggestion was Melon-headed Whale, which is a species that is very similar to the mystery specimen, except it has much deeper antorbital notches – those bits on the sides of the skull that stick out like the Millenium Falcon’s cockpit.

The mystery skull is in fact from a White-beaked Dolphin, Lagenorhynchus albirostris (Gray, 1846). This is a species that lives in cold North Atlantic waters, feeding on Cod and related fish. Well done to everyone who managed to work it out!

I’ve provided a few links through the blog to some online resources that might be useful for comparing images or descriptions of cetacean skulls. Here are a few more that might come in useful:
Seawatch Foundation factsheets
Museums Victoria collections database
National Museum of Nature and Science, Japan – Marine Mammal Infiormation Database