Whales of Distinction: Old specimens now declared a new species
By Susan Milius
Japanese scientists have named a new category of living baleen whales to explain a series of puzzling specimens that has been accumulating since 1976.
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Members of the just-identified species, Balaenoptera omurai, look like fin whales but have distinctive physical and genetic characteristics, report Shiro Wada of the Fisheries Research Agency in Yokohama, Japan, and his colleagues. Distinguishing marks include a broad, flat head with a uniquely shaped central joining of the skull bones. In its mouth, this whale has unusually few of the baleen plates that such whales use to filter food from the water. The researchers report in the Nov. 20 Nature that their analysis brings the number of known living baleen whale species to eight, although other scientists come up with different totals.