Creature record / 1983
Kotu, The Gambia. 12 June 1983. At about 8:30 in the morning, 15-year-old Owen Burnham walked onto Bungalow Beach with a brother, a sister and their father. Two local men were trying to cut the head off something enormous that had washed up in the night. It was 15 to 16 feet long. Long, thin jaws held eighty sharp teeth. Two nostrils sat at the tip of the snout. Four paddle flippers. No dorsal fin. Local fishermen said they had never seen it. Then the head was sold, the body was buried, and no photograph was ever taken. Was Gambo a beaked whale, a prehistoric survivor, or a story?
June 1983. A family walked onto Bungalow Beach, below the Bungalow Beach Hotel at Kotu, The Gambia. Owen Burnham was 15, an amateur wildlife enthusiast. With Owen were a brother, a sister and their father. Something had come ashore in the night.