Abstract. We give an example of a nonseparable Banach space V and a function x on [0,1] with values in the unit sphere of V that is an extreme point of the unit balls of all Bochner L'-spaces Lp(\, V), 1 < p < oo, a Lebesgue measure, though none of its values is an extreme point of the unit ball of V. This shows that a characterization of the extremal elements in Lp(k, V) for separable V, given by J. A. Johnson, does not hold in general.The extremal elements in the unit sphere of vector-valued CK-or TAspaces have been studied by many authors, e.g. in [2, 5 and 6]. (For the definition and elementary properties of Bochner L^-spaces we refer the reader to [4].) A quite natural question is to ask whether such a function x is extremal if and only if(1) the function ||x(-)|| is extremal in the corresponding scalar function space and (2) the vector x(t) is extremal in the ball with radius ||x(i)|| for all t in a dense subset of the base space (in the CK-case) resp. for almost all t (in the TZ-case).The "if" part is easy and well known; on the other hand, necessity of (1) is trivial. Hence the remaining question is the necessity of (2).In the case/? = 1 the necessity is easily seen, since (1) implies that the support of x is an atom (see also [6]).The CK-case was settled long ago. Blumenthal, Lindenstrauss, and Phelps have shown in [2] that for real range spaces V with dimension < 3 the condition (2) is necessary. On the other hand they give an example of a 4-dimensional space V and an extremal x in C([0, 1], V) taking no extremal values. In the remaining cases 1