GLOUCESTER, Mass. — A dead minke whale that arrived in April on the tides of stormy Ipswich Bay left in pieces on Monday, nothing more than a deconstructed and pungent memory.

Representatives of NOAA Fisheries, the city Harbormaster’s Office and the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, sectioned the whale’s skeleton and carted it off before noon.

The remaining tissue was cut into small pieces and left for the other animal denizens where the whale washed ashore, in Folly Cove.

The skeleton’s destination will probably be a research laboratory, according to Tom French, now retired as a biologist from the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

“It’ll be cleaned up first,” said French, who was working on his 27th minke whale. “It’s busted up so much that you’d never be able to put it all back together. Still, it has value in simple research and old-school science, such as taking measurements and studying the shapes of the bones.”

There’s also the matter of some missing parts.

The whale’s lower mandible disappeared at some point during its two-month stay on the rocks and upper beach of the cove. Washed out to sea? Carted off? No one really knows.

French seemed to suspect human activity. “Whoever has the lower jaws, we’d like to have ‘em back,” he said.

The dead whale, which measured almost 26 feet, arrived sometime during the overnight of April 16 and became an instant attraction — in real life and on social media.

Visitors congregated around the carcass. It’s not every day you get to walk up to a whale.

They snapped photos. Some took selfies.

NOAA Fisheries counseled that the city’s best course of action was to let the whale decompose rather than trying to move it or drag it out to sea.

“For this particular case, due to the condition of the carcass and the rocky nature of Folly Cove, it would be difficult for the city to safely bring in heavy equipment to haul the carcass away to a landfill or bury the

carcass on site,” NOAA Fisheries said about two weeks after the whale appeared.

Natural decomposition provided another benefit as a food source to other animals, marine and otherwise, in the local ecosystem.

Still, that was not the strategy of choice for some residents of the cove. Some objected to the smell. Others worried about the possibility of natural contamination. They wanted the whale gone.

“I can understand that,” Mendy Garron, Marine Mammal Response Program coordinator at NOAA Fisheries, said as she and the rest of the crew finished loading the skeleton into the back of a truck. “But it ended up in a really tough place. We couldn’t do a full necropsy, and we really couldn’t move it.”

NOAA officials said from the beginning they could not determine what caused the whale’s death because of the inability to do a full necropsy and the level of decomposition when it washed ashore.

They did say there were no indications of gear entanglement or ship-strike.

Garron said Monday’s final chapter didn’t provide any additional insight into what happened to the whale.