Jim Mead is Curator of Marine Mammals in the Division of Mammals, National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. He spent three seasons working for the Canadian government at a whaling station in Newfoundland, where he got first-hand contact with the larger whales. He has always had an interest in the paleontology of whales as was evidenced by the title of his first paper in 1975 – “A fossil beaked whale (Cetacea: Ziphiidae) from the Miocene of Kenya”. In his early years at the Smithsonian he did field work Argentina and Peru. His most recent field work was to Japan in the summers in 1985 and 1986 where he studied freshly caught beaked whales, a pelagic family of whales that we know almost nothing about. He has participated in the discovery and naming of two living beaked whales.