The researchers studied rorqual whales, the largest group of baleen whales. They include nine species like the blue whale, which can weigh up to 165 tons (150 metric tonnes). The smallest rorqual ...

Lunge feeding in rorqual whales (a group that includes blue, humpback and fin whales) is unique among mammals, but details of how it works have remained elusive. Now, scientists from the ...

The bodies of the giant rorqual whales—including the blue, fin and humpback—have been regularly displayed in museums, filmed by documentary makers, and harpooned by hunters.

But there’s an elephant in the room. Actually, it’s a blue whale. It may be clear why rorqual whales are so large in general, but of these giants, why are blue whales so much larger than all ...

In a new study, scientists demonstrate that rorqual whales — whose members include the largest animal on Earth, the blue whale — have come to share very similar feeding mechanisms and jaw ...

To eat, rorqual whales open their mouths and lunge while their tongues invert and their mouths fill like giant water balloons full of floating prey. The whales' nerves are stretchy so they can ...

Baleen whales evolved bristly baleen plates instead of teeth, which filter or trap krill, plankton and small fish inside their mouths. The 14 baleen species include the rorqual family – slender ...

She’d like to see a different family of whales examined for comparison, as the three individuals studied were all juvenile rorqual whales. Elemans says he wants to study an adult male ...

But just how nervous tissue could endure whale gulping without injury wasn’t clear. In a study published February 16 in Current Biology, Lillie and colleagues have discovered that these whale nerves ...

These questions about the biology of gigantism drive our research on rorqual whales, a family of whales that all use an extreme feeding strategy called lunge filter feeding. To study lunge-feeding ...