“Melon-headed whales have a very rounded head, and rough-toothed dolphins have a very long, gently sloping rostrum, or beak,” Robin Baird, a researcher for Cascadia Research Collective, told The Dodo. “Instead of having a rounded head like a melon-headed whale or the long, sloping rostrum of a rough-toothed dolphin, it had something in between. So it had a sloping rostrum, but a relatively short one.”
Eager to figure out what this animal was, they used a humane method to obtain a skin biopsy sample, and then got it tested in the lab.