On 31 January 1767, during a heavy sea, the inhabitants of a village near Zadar on the Dalmatian coast saw a tall spout of water, and in the waves below it, a sizeable dark mass. Straight away, four large boats with twenty or so sailors aboard, “armed with rifles and axes”, ventured out toward the enormous animal, which was unable to get away from the shore. The sailors let off a volley of bullets at the animal and “the water became blood red”, but it continued to struggle for fully six hours, capsizing one of the boats with a blow of its tail and biting into another, before it was killed by a blow to the head with an axe. The remains of the whale were recovered by the Serenissima and taken to Padua, a prized addition to the University’s Laboratory of Natural History. What remains of this specimen today are the skull, the jaws, fifteen or so vertebrae and ribs, and a few bones of the pectoral fins. The bones of the head, which at the time were assembled wrongly, with the skull upside down and the jaws detached in the manner of a whale, were restored to their correct anatomical position.
