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Female beaked whales' teeth are hidden in the gums and are not visible, and most male beaked whales have only two short tusks. Narwhals have vestigial teeth other than their tusk, which is present on males and 15% of females and has millions of nerves to sense water temperature, pressure and salinity.
Whales have two flippers on the front, and a tail fin. These flippers contain four digits. Although whales do not possess fully developed hind limbs, some, such as the sperm whale and bowhead whale, possess discrete rudimentary appendages, which may contain feet and digits.
Baleen whales have two flippers on the front, near the head. Like all mammals, baleen whales breathe air and must surface periodically to do so. Their nostrils, or blowholes, are situated at the top of the cranium. Baleen whales have two blowholes, as opposed to toothed whales which have one.
A researcher fires a biopsy dart at an orca.The dart will remove a small piece of the whale's skin and bounce harmlessly off the animal. Cetology (from Greek κῆτος, kētos, "whale"; and -λογία, -logia) or whalelore (also known as whaleology) is the branch of marine mammal science that studies the approximately eighty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises in the scientific ...
Whales do not lay eggs. Since they are mammals, they give birth to live young. There are only five known monotremes , or egg-laying mammals, according to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
In a process of convergent evolution, marine mammals such as dolphins and whales redeveloped their body plan to parallel the streamlined fusiform body plan of pelagic fish. Front legs became flippers and back legs disappeared, a dorsal fin reappeared and the tail morphed into a powerful horizontal fluke. This body plan is an adaptation to being ...
The beluga's body shape is stocky and fusiform (cone-shaped with the point facing backwards), and they frequently have folds of fat, particularly along the ventral surface. [38] Between 40% and 50% of their body weight is fat, which is a higher proportion than for cetaceans that do not inhabit the Arctic, where fat only represents 30% of body ...
Scientists think they might have finally learned the secret to how whales sing their complicated songs. We knew whales made a vast array of vocalizations, called songs, that can carry for ...