Rare tusked whales have been identified and photographed alive at sea for the first time following a herculean research effort off the shores of Mexico, a new study finds.

The newly-sighted cetaceans are ginkgo-toothed beaked whales (Mesoplodon ginkgodens), which were previously only known from dead individuals that had washed ashore and from bycatch. This isn’t all that unusual for beaked whales, which are deep divers and notoriously cryptic, spending their lives away from coastlines.

“Beaked whales are the largest least-known animals left on the planet,” study co-author Robert Pitman, an affiliate of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, told Live Science in an email. “It is exciting to think that there [are] still organisms here on earth that weigh over a ton and have never been identified alive in the wild.”

The hunt for and subsequent discovery of the elusive creatures was sparked by a recording of a distinct echolocation pulse in the North Pacific. Researchers began searching for the animals responsible for the mysterious sonar signal in 2020, and in June of 2024, it led them to a single beaked whale. Within days of that sighting, the team then found a small group of the whales, including a battle-scarred adult male and adult female with a calf.

Beaked whale species can be difficult to tell apart, so simply observing the whales wasn’t enough to identify them. The team only confirmed what they had seen after collecting a DNA sample by shooting one of the whales with a crossbow. (Don’t worry, the whale is fine.)

The researchers published their findings online July 28 in the journal Marine Mammal Science, which will appear in the upcoming January 2026 issue of the journal. Study lead author Elizabeth Henderson, a bioacoustic researcher at the Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific, said that the findings demonstrated the benefits of determination and not giving up. “Myself and some of the other folks on this trip (Gustavo Cardenas, Jay Barlow) spent five years looking for these whales; we spent every year since 2020 searching off Baja to find them, and that effort and determination paid off with a huge reward,” Henderson told Live Science in an email.

Ginkgo-toothed beaked whales are so named because the males have a pair of teeth that resemble the fan-shaped leaves of a ginkgo tree. For the whales, almost all of this shape is hidden in the jaw and gum tissue, with only the tip of each tooth visible on either side of their mouth. The teeth grow into small tusks as the males mature, and aren’t for eating, but are used as weapons.