Hello lovely people and welcome to a Fun Fact From Flora ,
It has been a wee while hasn’t it? I would promise greater consistency, but I don’t want to. So let’s focus on what really matters. Humpback whale mouths.
I bet you didn’t think they could get cooler.
WRONG.
I came across some research done on humpback whale foetuses in the collection at the Natural History Museum in London. Weirdly enough, foetal development can often tell us a lot about the evolution of a species. Sometimes animals that evolve to lose a certain trait , still grow that trait in the womb. It just doesn’t last all the way to birth.
At the NHM in London, they have seven humpback whale foetuses at various stages of development. I know you are dying to see what a whale foetus looks like, so I have collated these pics from the Natural History Museum website.
And this is the oldest one:
He LOOKS LIKE A PERFECT BUT TINY WHALE. Isn’t that so adorable?! And like only a tiiiiiny bit creepy
Important information here is that humpback whales are filter-feeders , meaning they take a BIG gulp of food, use special bristly plates (side note I am now developing a crockery company called Special Bristly Plates if anyone wants to invest just hit me up) to strain the water out, and then monch on the tasty krill and small fish left in their mouth. This is what the baleen look like:
Not all whales have these funky plates. Some of them (like sperm whales and killer whales) have teeth instead and this is thought to be, what we Biologists like to call, the ancestral state. Meaning that all early whales will have started with teeth , and some species went on to evolve these baleen plates, rather than the other way around.
Amazingly, analysis of these little foetuses has showed that humpbacks do in fact grow teeth. But they REABSORB THEM INTO THEIR JAWS , and then grow baleen plates. This transition from teeth-to-baleen occurs in the final third of their foetus lives (aka the period of gestation).
In slightly more science-y terms we are seeing mineralized tooth germs (these are pre-teeth growths) forming in the gums, but they never erupt. Instead, the whales reabsorb them and produce baleen instead.
Is that not absolute madness ??
Gosh they are so cool.
Best fishes,
Flora
Here is your GIF of an animal falling over:
