Dear colleagues, We are pleased to inform you that during this last European Cetacean Society Meeting in Madeira we held a workshop named “What is new in cetacean Pathology”organized by Antonio Fernández ( antonio.fernandez@ulpgc.es). This workshop was aimed at using pathology as a tool for cetacean health and conservation. Advances in cetacean pathology including field, laboratory diagnosis, new methodologies, and tools were presented and discussed. This year we have focused on ear and brain methodology and pathology, gas embolism, morbillivirus (detection and pathology), and contaminants. We closed the workshop with case reports for discussion. One of the many methods presented at this workshop was a recent publication to score gas bubbles in carcasses (Bernaldo de Quirós Y, Saavedra P, Møllerløkken A, Brubakk AO, Jørgensen A, González-Díaz O, Martín-Barrasa JL, and Fernández A. Differentiation at necropsy between in vivo gas embolism and putrefaction using a gas score. Research in Veterinary Science 106: 48-55, 2016). Given that the method has recently been published we would like to share with you some of the conclusions of this manuscript: 1) a new easy, fast, and inexpensive method was validated to discriminate between gas bubbles produced by putrefaction and gas embolism, 2) gas bubbles were not introduced in the vascular system if the dissection was properly carried out, 3) none or very few gas bubbles were found in fresh carcasses, 4) post-mortem off gassing in animals that reach surface alive after decompression was not found relevant, 5) the presence of large quantities of gas bubbles in fresh carcasses (code 2) was due to gas embolism. The article is available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034528816300522 or you could send pdf requests to ybernaldo@becarios.ulpgc.es. We would like to take this chance to thank the more than 40 participants of over 10 countries that made this workshop possible. We look forward for your participation in the next workshop. Kind regards, Prof. Antonio Fernández Yara Bernaldo de Quirós