The texts and Tweets, e-mails and phone calls started to fly early on Monday afternoon — a dead whale had washed up in the shallow surf at Seventh Street in Ocean City.

Within an hour, crowds started to form on the beach and boardwalk on a rainy January afternoon with more and more people arriving to catch a glimpse of the unfortunate visitor.

The stench was the first thing to greet Monday's visitors — with a sea breeze carrying the smell of the dead mammal to the boardwalk and street-ends nearby. The whale came ashore near the jetty at Seventh Street, and the waves rocked the carcass in the shallow water just off the beach.

"It's a very dead and badly decomposing whale that washed ashore" said Sheila Dean, co-director of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine. 

On Tuesday, assisted by a pair of Ocean City Department of Public Works front-end loaders, technicians from the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine and several volunteers used flensing blades to cut the carcass into sections.

The whale, roughly 60 feet long, was a finback whale, which is an endangered species, and techinicians have determined it died as a result of being struck by a ship.

The remains of the whale were transported by public works crews to a spot on the bay side of the Ocean City-Longport Bridge, where they are being buried under mounds of sand. About three-quarters of the whale has been removed from the beach at Seventh Street by Tuesday evening, according to Ocean City Business Administrator Mike Dattilo.

Marine Mammal Stranding Center Director Bob Schoelkopf said the center techs will further review photographs of damage to the whale's vertebrae to help determine what type and size of ship.

Word spread quickly throughout the region on Monday that the whale had washed ashore, and the carcass became an immediate spectacle with crowds arriving to take a look.

Police had to maintain a presence on the beach overnight Monday to Tuesday to keep onlookers from approaching the decomposing carcass. On Tuesday, with sunny weather and temperatures in the 50s drawing even more of a crowd, police blocked access to the beach near the carcass.

Ocean City real estate agent and Historical Museum President Ken Cooper said he had received about 20 calls about the whale.

"Everybody's talking about it," he said.

John Breckenridge, visiting from Philadelphia, chanced upon the scene early on Monday afternoon.

"It's sad," he said. "But at the same time, it's amazing. It's not every day you get to see an animal that big."