A beached sperm whale weighing 50 tonnes covered the centre of Tainan City in blood, blubber and stinking entrails when it exploded during its transportation to a research laboratory.
"Because of the natural decomposing process, a lot of gases accumulated and, when the pressure build-up was too great, the whale's belly exploded and spilt blood and innards on the street," Wang Chienping, of the National Cheng Kung University, said.
Television pictures showed shops, parked cars and pedestrian walkways splattered with putrid scraps of whale.
Piles of intestines and guts were strewn along the roads. "What a
stinking mess. This blood and other stuff that blew out on the road is disgusting, and the smell is really awful," one resident said.
The whale was close to death when it was found on Saturday by a
fisherman on a stretch of Taiwan's west coast in Yunlin county.
Conservation groups and marine biologists sought unsuccessfully to rescue it. Professor Wang said the whale measured 17m, making it the largest mammal recorded in Taiwan
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