Researchers in Japan led by the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Kobe and Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka, have discovered that whale shark vision has uniquely temperature-dependent adaptations unseen in ...
For decades, researchers and the public have been captivated by the deep-diving sperm whales, highly social animals who live in groups of mothers and calves. The whales communicate with Morse code-like series of clicks called ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 12, 2022
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656
The two-meter skull of a newly discovered species of giant ichthyosaur, the earliest known, is shedding new light on the marine reptiles' rapid growth into behemoths of the Dinosaurian oceans, and helping us better understand ...
Evolution
Dec 23, 2021
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2592
At 100 feet long and weighing more than 100 tons, blue whales are the largest creatures to have evolved on the planet. Other whales, like killer whales, are larger than most terrestrial animals but pale in comparison to the ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 12, 2019
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141
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have determined that toothed whales lack functional Mx genes—a surprising discovery, since all 56 other sequenced mammals in the study possess these genes to fight ...
Evolution
Jun 15, 2015
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855
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shed new light on how diving mammals, such as the sperm whale, have evolved to survive for long periods underwater without breathing.
Plants & Animals
Jun 13, 2013
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0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Biologists at the University of California, Riverside report new evidence for evolutionary change recorded in both the fossil record and the genomes (or genetic blueprints) of living organisms, providing ...
Evolution
Sep 4, 2009
42
0
UBC researchers believe a group of killer whales observed hunting marine mammals including sperm whales, as well as a sea turtle, in the open ocean off California and Oregon could be a new population.
Plants & Animals
Mar 15, 2024
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81
The functioning of certain regions of a few genes in cetaceans (whales, porpoises and dolphins) may explain why the Blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) can reach lengths of up to 30 meters—almost 10 m more than a bus—while ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 22, 2024
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2
A sperm whale expert at Dalhousie University, in Canada, has found evidence showing that sperm whales form large matrilineally based clans that have their own coda dialect. In his paper published in the journal Royal Society ...
Physeteroidea Kogiidae
The sperm whale family, or sperm whales, is a common name for the family Physeteridae or superfamily Physeteroidea. The three existing species of whale are the Sperm Whale, in the genus Physeter, and the Pygmy Sperm Whale and Dwarf Sperm Whale, in the genus Kogia. In the past these genera have sometimes been united in the single family, Physeteridae, with the two Kogia species in a subfamily (Kogiinae), however recent practice is to allocate the genus Kogia to its own family, Kogiidae, leaving Physeteridae as a monotypic (single extant species) family, although additional fossil representatives of both families are known (see "Evolution"). The name Sperm Whale comes from sailors of whaling boats who thought that the spermaceti on the whales head was actual sperm from the reproductive system.
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