THE WORLD, New York City, June 12, 1923

• Long Key, Florida whale shark capture

The bottom of the front page has a two column heading: "Harpoon, 50 Shots, 12-Hour Fight Subdue 20-Ton Shark In Florida" See below for details.

Thirty pages, light toning, some margin wear with tiny tears, should be handled with care.

Background: The capture of the 32-foot, 20-ton whale shark off Long Key, Florida, in June 1923 stands as a historic milestone in marine biology and early 20th-century sensationalist journalism due to the extreme rarity of such encounters at the time. Prior to the 1920s, whale sharks (Rhincodon typus)—the largest living fish species in the world—were almost entirely shrouded in mystery, with only a handful of documented scientific specimens globally and virtually no public awareness of their presence in North American waters. The event garnered national headlines not only because of the creature's colossal scale, but because the ordeal escalated into a dramatic multi-day struggle: after being harpooned and tied to a dock, the giant carcass was towed by the tugboat Liberty toward Key West, leaking blood into the Atlantic and sparking a chaotic feeding frenzy among swarms of aggressive tiger sharks that fishermen had to physically fight off to preserve the specimen. Beyond the media frenzy, the occurrence held significant scientific value, drawing researchers and taxidermists from the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Aquarium to preserve plaster casts, skeletal remains, and tissue samples, providing early Western science with crucial anatomical data on a species that was then considered a near-mythical "sea monster" rather than the gentle, filter-feeding giant known today.