Great Barrier Reef gets a rare visit from world's most elusive whale species!

Image courtesy: Wikipedia

New Delhi: Guess who paid a rare visit to the surface of the Great Barrier Reef? The omura whale! Yes, the world's most elusive whale was sighted for the first time on the reef.

The whale was spotted two weeks ago by passengers aboard a dive boat, but the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority confirmed its identity yesterday.

The incident took place at Mission Beach, which totals the mammal's sighting to two after it was spotted in Madagascar last year.

Divers from a snorkeling tour company in Queensland called Reef Express, managed to record a video of the rare encounter, but they had absolutely no inkling of the identity of the creature.

This is the first confirmed sighting of the said species in the Great Barrier Reef.

"That morning we'd seen it in the distance, about half a kilometre away, so we knew there was a whale of some sort in the area. We stopped the vessel and turned the motors off - we were fairly determined we were going to wait and see if it popped up somewhere else - and low and behold it popped up 15 metres away from the boat, which was pretty surprising," said Reef Express owner Kerryn Bell.

"It was quite a shock for all of us because none of us had actually seen a whale like that. The last thing we expected was to see any sort of whale, let alone one of the rarest whales in the word," she added, Nature World News reported.

According to Earth Touch News Network, Omura's whales (Balaenoptera omurai) is a baleen whale that has a unique two-toned jaw, which is white on the right side and black on the other side. Growing between 33 and 38 feet, the Omura's whales existence was only confirmed by Japanese researchers in 2003.

Check out the video posted on Facebook below: