At first, Duiker Bas van der Sanden from Breda thought he saw a piece of wood when he recently dived into the Oosterschelde. But the color was not entirely on. He decided to swim along his find and noticed that it had to be a very large piece of wood. “Halfway through I started to realize: this is not wood, this is bone!” He soon realized that the piece of bone was about 2.70 meters long from a whale.
Such a bone on the bottom does not bring most of the divers to a two-three-three. But Bas has experience. “Over the years I had had to pop up extra lead belts a little more often. Then you know how to deal with this kind of thing, if you as a diver of a depth of approximately fifteen meters have to be up with more weight than you used Are he, he says to Omroep Zeeland.
It was soon clear to Van der Sanden that the bone was a piece of lower jaw of a whale. “As a twelve -year -old boy I went to Schiermonnikoog with my parents. There they used these jaw parts as an entrance gate for the apartment complex where we then had a room.”
Bas made these underwater images:
Waiting for privacy settings …
The find raises questions. Because probably the whale or that part of the whale must have passed through the Oosterscheldekering in one way or another. “Of course it is an obstacle,” says the diver. “But a few years ago a humpback bridge also swam through the Oosterschelde. And it must also have been swimming outside again. So it is possible.”
But the diver also takes other scenarios into account. Possibly the animal lay on the bow of a ship. In this way, a whale of Terneuzen rather entered the locks. “For example, one may have entered the Oosterschelde via the locks.”
The bone is still in a freezer and is brought to a preparer as quickly as possible, the diver says. Bas works at Stichting Natuurstad Rotterdam and tries to make children enthusiastic about nature. He wants ‘his’ vinvisbot also used for educational purposes. Zeezoogdierhulp Foundation has already given him a guarantee of this.