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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Even the biggest living creatures sometimes die quietly and slip unnoticed to their rest. A giant whale might have done just that if not for the crew of the research vessel Nautilus. They spotted the whale's mostly complete skeleton decomposing off the California coast on Monday.

"Coming across a natural whale fall is pretty uncommon," one of the researchers says in a video posted to YouTube. A "whale fall" is the rather romantic phrase used when a whale's carcass sinks to the ocean floor, where it provides a buffet bonanza for smaller sea creatures.

"The whale skeleton can support rich communities for years to decades, both as a hard substrate (or surface) for invertebrate colonization and as a source of sulfides from the decay of organic compounds of whale bones," the National Ocean Service explains on its site. "Microbes live off of the energy released from these chemical reactions and form the basis of ecosystems for as long as the food source lasts.

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