Pilot whales
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| Monodontidae | ||||||||||||
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The gudgeon whales (Monodontidae) are a family of toothed whales up to about 6 m long in northern (especially arctic) seas. The head is bluntly rounded with a bulging forehead, the pectoral fins are relatively small and rounded, a dorsal fin is missing. The gudgeon whales mainly feed on the bottom, hence the name. Morphological, immunological and molecular biological investigations confirm the close relationship of the gudgeon whales with the porpoises , which are their sister taxons and belong to the dolphins . They are therefore united with these families in a common superfamily Delphinoidea.
The gudgeon whales are similar to each other in size and shape. Their relatively stocky body has a thick layer of bubbles to protect them from the cold. They have a rounded head with a very short snout and a flexible neck. The back fin is missing, the flippers are small and rounded, the fluke has a clear indentation.
The only two representatives of the green whale are the narwhal ( Monodon monoceros ) and the white whale or beluga ( Delphinapterus leucas ). Due to large similarity with the white whale was sometimes the Irrawaddy dolphin counted here, but clearly one of recent studies to the real dolphins.
swell
- Mark Carwardine : Whales and Dolphins . Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-7688-2473-6 , p. 90-91 .
- Laura May-Collado, Ingi Agnarsson: Cytochrome b and Bayesian inference of whale phylogeny . In: Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution . tape 38 , no. 2 , 2006, p. 344–354 (English, online: pdf ).
