Page 208 - Atlas Of The World's Strangest Animals

208 ATLAS OF THE WORLD’S STRANGEST ANIMALS

Like all mammals, narwhals hold their breath underwater, and A thick layer of pack ice lies across the water’s surface.
this pod of feeding adults have got themselves into trouble. Luckily, a female spots a brightly lit region,just above.

Narwal habitats environment. However, it’s only the narwhals that grow
such tremendous tusks.
What’s the difference between a horn and a tusk? Horns
grow from the head and are made of keratin, surrounding
a core of living bone.Tusks are over-sized teeth and, in the
case of narwhals, it’s one of their two teeth that form the
tusk.These amazing appendages grow from the left side of
the male’s jaw, through the upper lip. One in every 500
narwhals has a right-sided tusk and, very rarely, both
incisors develop into tusks.
In the Middle Ages, unscrupulous traders often sold
these terrific teeth as the horns of unicorns.These
mythical beasts are usually portrayed as white horses with
a long, spiral horn growing from the centre of their
forehead. Older images show them as more of a hybrid
animal, made from bits of various beasts, but they’re always
powerful and considered to be pure – so pure that a
unicorn horn was said to be able to neutralize poison.
This made them extremely valuable and one, given to
Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) of England by the
The scientific family Monodontidae contains two very privateer Martin Frobisher (1535–94), was worth 10 times
unusual species of whale – the narwhal and the beluga its weight in gold.
(Delphinapterus leucas). Both are found in the cold waters
around the Arctic Ocean, and in coastal regions in the far Sensitive ‘spears’?
north of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.They have a Narwhals’ strange ‘spears’ can reach up to 3m (9.8ft) long.
similar body shape, with a stocky ‘torso’, bulbous head and That’s more than 63 per cent of their entire body length.
fatty ridge running along the back in place of the usual These amazing structures are the only known example of a
dorsal fin.They are air-breathing mammals that give birth helix-formed (spiral) tooth and the only straight tusk
to live young.They communicate using sounds, and they found on a living animal.And until very recently no one
echolocate, using sound to build up a 3D ‘picture’ of their knew for certain what the purpose of these tusks was.

(c) 2011 Marshall Cavendish. All Rights Reserved.