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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-because-they-could-doesn't-mean-they-should dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Narwhals and belugas can interbreed

For nearly thirty years, a strange-looking whale skull has gathered dust in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Now, a team of researchers has determined the reason for the skull's unique characteristics: it belongs to a narwhal-beluga hybrid.

A Greenlandic hunter shot the whale in the 1980's and was puzzled by its odd appearance. He therefore kept the skull and placed it on the roof of his toolshed. Several years later, Professor Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources visited the settlement and also immediately recognized the skull's strange characteristics. He interviewed the hunter about the anomalous whale he had shot, and sent the skull to Copenhagen. Since then, it has been stored at the Zoological Museum, a part of the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

"As far as we know, this is the first and only evidence in the world that these two Arctic whale species can interbreed. Based on the intermediate shape of the skull and teeth, it was suggested that the specimen might be a narwhal-beluga hybrid, but this could not be confirmed. Now we provide the data that confirm that yes -- it is indeed a hybrid," says Eline Lorenzen, evolutionary biologist and curator at the University of Copenhagen's Natural History Museum of Denmark. Lorenzen led the study, which was published today in Scientific Reports.

Using DNA and stable isotope analysis, the scientists determined that the skull belonged to a male, first-generation hybrid between a female narwhal and male beluga.

Mikkel Skovrind, Jose Alfredo Samaniego Castruita, James Haile, Eve C. Treadaway, Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Michael V. Westbury, Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, Paul Szpak, Eline D. Lorenzen. Hybridization between two high Arctic cetaceans confirmed by genomic analysis. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-44038-0


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  • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:31PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:31PM (#858890)

    Yeah, so can whites and coloreds.

    Pretty amazing, isn't it?

    Biology is cool!

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:55PM (#858898)

    Depends on how horny the Narwhals are.