up from the comments

I promoted this to the main page cos it was tooo gooood to leave languishing in yesterday's comments...

Camera Trap Codger said...

Risso's dolphins bring back fine memories of the time I was hired by the California Academy of Sciences to flense and de-flesh one that had been shot by some shady abalone divers south of San Francisco. All that meat seemed such a waste. So I froze the tenderloins. A few months later a Natural History of the Vertebrates course (SF State College) had an overnight field trip to the Sierra Nevadas, and that night the undergrads had what you would call a "jolly good time". At midnight, when no one was feeling any pain, we started to fry the defrosted meat. Naturally, after a while they all wanted to know what it was, and of course no one would believe they were eating the meat of a "toothed whale". Ah yes, Risso's dolphin, so fine a fishe!
Hope you see more!

Now I need to think of a true cetacean flesh story of my own. Hmmm... let's see. Oh yes. In the mid-90s a Sperm Whale was stranded in the Firth of Forth upstream from Edinburgh. It stayed a few days in the river - each day a flotilla of small boats would drive it out to sea, only next morning for it to reappear increasingly upriver. It was quite an attraction, lots of people came to see it and the local press nicknamed it 'Moby' in the predictable way they do. Also predictably, Moby died, and was scooped up so that his bones could be prepared for display at the Royal Scottish Museum. At the time I was working at the Vet School in Edinburgh, and we received some fleshy bits of Moby, including his outsize appendage which we predictably renamed Moby's Dick. It must have been 2 m long and filled a bath of formaldehyde by itself. The funny bit is that the Vet School was founded by William Dick and his severe-looking wife Mary, and is in fact fully titled the 'Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Sciences', or to all and sundry, 'The Dick Vet'. So, what we WANTED to do was to get Moby's Dick stuffed in an upstanding position and use it as the School mascot, with the motto 'Is this the Dick Vet or what?' Sadly it never came to fruition, but you can't make up that kind of entertainment.