Integrative and Comparative Biology, Vol. 56, No. 6 (December 2016), pp. 1271-1284 (14 pages) The origin of baleen and filter feeding in mysticete cetaceans occurred sometime between approximately 34 ...

At 98 feet long and 200 tons, blue whales are by far the largest animals on Earth. To get that massive, blue whales need to eat millions of calories. A day. They feed exclusively through baleen filter ...

Researchers used noninvasive suction tags to observe the behavior of Antarctic minke whales as they fed on krill in the waters off the West Antarctic Peninsula. (Photo by David Cade, Hopkins Marine ...

MELBOURNE, Nov. 30 (UPI) --Baleen whales are named for the long hair-like strands that hang from their mouth and filter food from the ocean. But baleen whales didn't always filter their food; their ...

Minke whales are the smallest of the rorqual group of baleen whales, which use a “lunge feeding” strategy to capture large amounts of small prey such as krill. Credit: Duke Marine Robotics and Remote ...

The origin of filter feeding in baleen whales -- the largest animal known to have ever existed -- is now better understood, thanks to research on 'Alfred' the 25- million-year-old fossilized whale ...

When rorqual whales feed, they lunge through the water with mouths open wide, taking in vast patches of their tiny prey suspended in a volume of water as big as their massive bodies in one giant gulp.

Baleen plates are bristly, flexible comb-like structures inside the mouths of toothless whales that filter out the food the whales gulp. They have now been found to hold a chemical record of the ...

“The snout of Hupehsuchus is highly convergent with modern baleen whales,” the study concludes. Yet does that mean that whales are somehow descended from the noble Hupehsuchus? Not exactly. “There is ...

A fin whale mother and calf feeding near the ocean's surface. The pair were not part of the recent feeding frenzy in Antarctica. Last year, passengers on board a cruise ship near Antarctica were ...

A recently published scientific paper entitled “Kinematic Diversity in Rorqual Whale Feeding Mechanisms” (in Current Biology Sept 2016, Cade et al) caught my eye for a number of reasons. I had just ...

CT scans of a 25 million year-old fossil skull show the Aetiocetus weltoni had both teeth and baleen, unlike modern whales. A strange phenomenon happens with modern blue whales, humpback whales and ...