In 1873 James Hector, then director of the Colonial Museum in New Zealand (now Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), reported and illustrated the partially damaged mandible and teeth of a beaked whale collected in 1872 from Pitt Island, Chatham Islands, New Zealand. He assigned these to the species ‘‘Dolichodon layardii Scamperdown Whale’’ described by J. E. Gray from South Africa in 1865. In 1874 Gray concluded that the specimen from Pitt Island represented a new species, for which he proposed the name Dolichodon traversii, noting that ‘‘Mesoplodon layardi (or as I should call it, Dolichodon layardi) has a much longer and attenuated lower jaw, and much more slender teeth than the Chatham Island specimen.’’ Hector (1878), however, regarded Dolichodon traversii as synonymous with Mesoplodon layardi [sic].

McCann (1962) agreed with Hector and illustrated the tooth of this specimen as representing M. layardii, the now generally accepted scientific name for the strap-toothed whale. Hector’s original specimen is extant, in the condition in which it was collected in 1872, in the marine mammal collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, New Zealand, as NMNZ 546 (Fig. 1)