Impulsive acoustic and vibration signals within gear are often induced by impacting of fault tooths in gear. Thus the detection of these impulses can be useful for fault diagnosis. Recently there is an increasing trend towards the use of higher order statistics for fault detection within mechanical systems based on the observation that impulsive signals then to increase the kurtosis values. We show that the fourth order Wigner Moment Spectrum, called the Wigner Trispectrum, has found superior detection performance to second order Wigner distribution for typical impulsive signals in a condition monitoring application. These methods are also applied to data sets measured within an industrial gear box.