Reddit reviews Ecology & Palaeoecology of Marine Environments

You're getting a bit carried away. Nobody here except OP has seen the actual thing and the photo quality is too poor to tell whether or not that's a screw or a blob of bird shit or some other scum. As for the "flaking paint" - that's a highlight, just like you can see on the flipper. As for the caudal fluke, the right half is foreshortened because it's flexible and being bent into the sand; it doesn't look cracked at all. Edit: and even if it did, upon early dessication dolphin skin begins to crack and exfoliate like this dolphin in a more advanced state of decay. As for the cloth pattern, cetaceans have thick skin that has a series of fibers running in opposite directions for added strength during swimming (like this); the flipside of having a thick layer of connective tissue over the blubber is that everything else - muscles, blubber, viscera - decompose faster than the integument. It's actually fairly common for stranded cetaceans to have more or less intact looking skin, but much of the internal soft tissues around the skull (usually where decomposition advances quickest - around the mouth) will be turned into goo (which leaks out on a floating carcass, or pools up in a stranded carcass). Edit: here's a reference for these statements.. As for the bite marks, this is just how cetacean skin tends to behave when bitten by sharks or other marine mammals; if the initial bite can puncture the skin, the teeth travel easily through blubber making relatively deep but narrow incisions. The depth will be similar whether attacked by a shark or another cetacean.

Also: if it were fiberglass, fiberglass is usually done very thinly and for a mount this size almost certainly would be less than 5mm in thickness. There's no reason the skull would be left inside, and the fact that the hyoid apparatus is in articulation speaks to the authenticity of the carcass.

Here's a very similar (but fresher) carcass with identical wound over pan bone of mandible, but with less tooth-raking scars.

Source: I am a paleocetologist who has visited a number of strandings and dissections, and read most of the known literature on marine mammal decomposition.

Edit: Why am I getting downvoted? There's no way this is a fiberglass sculpture. I've seen plenty of strandings and this is a real carcass. If you disagree, please state your argument.