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Jun 22 2011 - 5:44pm
Paeleobiologist Dr. Nicholas Pyenson, Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), set out with Jorge Velez-Juarbe, NMNH Research Student and Ph. D. Candidate at Howard University and Aaron O'Dea from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
Since 1987, researchers have been tracking Phoenix. More about whales can be found in our Tale of a whale featured story.
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Aug 21 2012 - 8:51am
This early whale was well suited to life at sea. But it also lived on land. An ancestor of the right whale, Maiacetus lived 49-40 million years ago. It had flipper-like limbs and webbed feet, like modern seals. But it also had ankle bones - clues that although Maiacetus swam, its...
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Jul 27 2012 - 2:49pm
A male sperm whale feeding near the surface. Sperm whales are a toothed whale, rather than a baleen whale, and are found throughout the world's oceans.
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May 21 2012 - 1:23pm
After a few long days of hard work on the island, we were finally able to excavate and remove, not just one, but two skeletons of an early "toothed" baleen whale from the rocks near the Carmanah Lighthouse. All told, it took our team 3 days, along with assistance from Parks Canada, a chartered...
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Sep 20 2012 - 11:45am
Sperm whales have conical teeth on their long, narrow, lower jaw. The teeth fit neatly into sockets in the upper jaw, which has no teeth. This arrangement is a perfect adaptation for slurping up soft-bodied squids—giant or otherwise. The sperm whale is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN's Red List of...
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May 7 2012 - 3:54pm
Nick Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, points to the skull and skeleton of a fossil "toothed" mysticete (baleen whale) on the West Coast Trail of Vancouver Island in 2009. The skeleton, which is being excavated this spring 2012 by...
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May 5 2011 - 2:49pm
Rachel Caauwe was one of a dozen artists who spent a recent Saturday sketching specimens from the Smithsonian's musky-scented marine mammal collection. Here she's shown drawing the remains of a harbor seal (Phoca vitulina). The workshop, organized by the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators,...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
This is North Atlantic right whale #3333 who was spotted with fishing gear trailing from his mouth during an aerial survey off the coast of Georgia on January 29, 2008. Entanglement is one of the most serious threats facing North Atlantic right whales. Fortunately this individual was seen without...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
A life-size, meticulously detailed model of the North Atlantic right whale Phoenix hangs in the Smithsonian’s Sant Ocean Hall in the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC. More about Phoenix can be found in the Tale of a Whale photo essay.
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Apr 20 2012 - 1:22pm
On April 20, 2010, an explosion on the oil-drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caused the largest marine oil spill in US history, gushing nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil over the course of three months.
In the two years since, researchers have been hard at work studying the impacts of the spill....
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
This photograph was snapped as Phoenix swam in the Gulf of Maine in July 2008. More about the right whale can be found in our Tale of a Whale featured story.
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Mar 8 2012 - 12:30pm
Monodontids, the group of whales that includes living belugas and narwhals, are emblematic symbols of the Arctic. However, the fossil record shows that these animals had a much larger range than the northern pole.
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Dec 23 2010 - 2:14pm
“At night, spotted dolphins move offshore into the Gulf Stream’s deep waters in search of squid.” -- Nature's Best photographer, Andrew Sallmon.
See more beautiful ocean photos in our slideshow of winners from the 2010 Nature's Best Ocean Views photo contest.
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
Close-up of a 17th century painting shows how whales were brought ashore for processing and their blubber rendered into marketable oil. More about the right whale can be found in our Tale of a Whale photo essay.
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Sep 24 2010 - 12:25pm
Whales swim, but their ancestors walked. Whales are mammals (like us) whose ancestors lived on land. Life probably began in the ocean and then evolved to colonize the land. Yet the whale’s ancestors gradually moved from land to sea, adapting to their circumstances and surroundings. The ocean...
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May 11 2012 - 2:05pm
A female bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops sp.) carries a sponge, which it uses as a tool to dig up prey from the seafloor. The only dolphins known to use sponges as tools this way are the female members of a small group that live in Shark Bay, Australia. They pass the skill onto their daughters, but...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
Two North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) swim at the surface of the water. Learn more about this species in the North Atlantic Right Whale section.
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Dec 31 2012 - 8:49am
A right whale opens its mouth wide, revealing huge plates of baleen hanging from its upper jaw. There are between 200 and 270 baleen plates on each side of a right whale's upper jaw. They work like a giant sieve to catch the whale's food. Strong but flexible, baleen is made of the same substance as...
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Mar 8 2012 - 11:22am
Monodontids, the group of whales that includes the belugas and narwhals swimming our ocean today, are emblematic symbols of the Arctic. However, their fossil record, although scarce, suggests that these animals' ranges could have been much broader. Fossil monodontids have been previously found in...
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Jun 21 2011 - 2:35pm
“I took this photograph of spinner dolphins in calm waters off the Ogasawara Islands, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles south of Tokyo.When the sun briefly broke through the clouds, our shadow was mirrored in the water’s surface—and for a moment we were united with the dolphins...
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Oct 25 2010 - 6:18pm
In the episode of One Species at a Time, writer Karen Romano Young takes an icebreaker to Barrow, Alaska, to join in the festival of Naluqatak and learn about the intimate relationship between the Inupiat Eskimos and the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus). Listen as she tells Ari Daniel Shapiro how...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
There were fewer than 450 North Atlantic right whales in 2006. Yet it has been illegal to hunt them since 1935. Why haven’t populations increased? Traits that made right whales easy to hunt make them vulnerable to ship collisions and fishing gear. Sometimes, as the whales feed, they get entangled...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
Phoenix was photographed swimming off the coast of Canada in the Bay of Fundy in August 2007. More about the right whale can be found in our Tale of a Whale featured story.
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