How do you go about dissecting the world’s rarest whale? In December 2024, images from a concrete room in Mosgiel, just south of Dunedin, spread around the world as a team of people spent a week doing a scientific dissection on a spade-toothed whale that had washed up five months before. Claire Concannon joins them to find out what’s involved, what they have learned, and how the arrangements between local iwi and visiting scientists enabled knowledge sharing.

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