Cetacea

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The cetaceans are all water-going mammals. They include whales, dolphins, and related creatures.

It is believed that the cetaceans are decended from the land animals. There is evidence that whales are distantly related to cows. Modern whales have pelvises and leg bones, although they're inside their bodies and unused.

Cetaceans can be divided into two groups - cetaceans with teeth, and cetaceans with baleen, or big mouth-strainers that get the tasty living things out of the water. We'll look at the latter first. The baleen whales include the largest animals on earth, or more accurately, in the oceans. Among the baleen whales, there are the right and bowhead whales, which have no dorsal (back) fin. There are the rorquals (the Norweigan word for whale) which includes the massive blue whale and the humpback whale. These have a small dorsal fin and tend to be long and sleek in appearance. There is the grey whale, which has a series of bumps rather than a fin on its back, and the pygmy right whales, who are small right whales with dorsal fins. All baleen whales are gentle, filter-feeders. The toothed whales are more likely to be carnivores, feeding on fish and other marine life. Most of these animals live in the ocean, but one family lives in a river environment. Included in the toothed whales are the sperm whale, narwhal (the unicorn of the ocean), the white whale and beaked whale. Also here you'll find dolphins and porpoises. Porpoises look like a mixture between a dolphin and a whale. For those of you who like oddities, the Amazonian river dolphins, or botos as they're known around Brazil, are pink!