Island resident Brian Casey was out walking the beach in early January when he found a skull and called his uncle Jon Dodd, the Executive Director of the Atlantic Shark Institute in Rhode Island.
Dodd told The Block Island Times: “On Jan. 2, I got a text from my nephew Brian Casey who lives on the island. Brian lives off of Cooneymus Road on the southwest corner. He was walking the beach by Southwest Point, and he found the skull. He sent me a text and asked if I had any idea of what the skull was. It was clear it was a whale’s skull. I sent it off to a friend, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute identified it as a humpback whale skull,” said Dodd.
On Saturday, Jan. 30, the skull was removed by the Atlantic Shark Institute and a team of six volunteers, in an effort to get the skull off the beach and to the mainland.
“It became a recovery effort,” said Dodd. “What I did was I built a wooden cradle based on what the dimensions were so that six people could carry the skull and socially distance. This past weekend we got