People dragged the badly decomposed and putrid remains of a dead sperm whale this morning from a rocky shore to dry land near Kahuku Point.

An excavator then picked up the pieces, estimated to weigh 10 to 12 tons, and dumped them in a large trash bin. That bin was towed across the Kamehameha Highway and the pieces were buried in a pit on vacant land.

The shore around where the carcass had been will remain closed for at least 24 hours. No sharks were sighted today, but a 12-foot shark was seen near the carcass at high tide yesterday.

The whales' bones were saved by Hawaii Pacific University teachers and students for research. As the bones were being taken back to HPU, some of the big bones fell out of a pickup truck onto Kahekili Highway in Kaneohe, said HPU's Kristi West.

Traffic was routed around the site because the bone was too large for the students to pick up.

The carcass was pulled off the shore by employees of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; HPU students and teachers; and area residents.

They used ropes, straps and nets to pull the pieces over a cliff and onto land.

"It was difficult to access where it was," said Dave Schofield, a marine mammal response coordinator with NOAA. "It was like a lava catcher's mitt. There was lava on top and lava all around it."

Officials decided they couldn't use a crane to pick up the pieces, and that the pieces would break up and attract sharks if they pushed them out to sea.

The work began today at 5 a.m. The HPU crew salvaged bones and skeletal structure to help learn what sperm whales eat.

Schofield said it was impossible to determine the age of the whale and what killed it because the carcass was too decomposed to make tissue samples usable.