Dear colleagues, I am cooperating with a small North German museum to prepare a little exhibition on "cetaceans in the North Sea", which is to open in a few weeks. We are planning to do a poster or two on the extinct North Atlantic grey whale and may be able to get two mandible fragments of some five feet length each as a temporary loan. They were dredged up from the North Sea by a fish trawler and are said by the owner to have been identified as grey whale mandibles. As authenticated bone finds of the North Atlantic grey whale are exceedingly scarce, I want to verify this tentative identification before initiating the loan process and putting them on display. Can anyone provide me with some guidelines for the identification of grey whale mandibles, their morphology and osteometrics, esp. for clues as to telling them from balaenopterid and balaenid jawbones? It has been a while that I saw them, but I do not recall the presence of tips and condyls on these fragments. If I remember the looks of grey whale mandibles in Japanese collections correctly, likewise seen a long while ago, I think I recall the presence of comparatively many openings for blood vessels on these bones. Can that recollection be correct? Your help will be much appreciated and be properly credited on the poster. For the same poster(s), we would also like to show a pic or two of benthic foraging of grey whales. If you have any such images and were willing to allow us to reproduce them on our poster - aaarrrrgh ... free of charge - this would equally be much appreciated and properly credited. Thanks for your thoughts and any - given the deadline: quick - input! With greasy greetings from Cologne, Cheers Klaus Barthelmess