How Whitby got its whale jaw arch (evolutionarily speaking)

The whalebone arch at the top of Whitby’s West Cliff is an iconic tourist attraction and landmark of the town. It pays homage to the town’s history as a whaling port in the 18th and 19th Centuries when over two thousand Arctic whales were hunted for their blubber and oil. The bones that form the arch are the jaws of a bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), one of the main species targeted by whalers. It belongs to a group of whales that use a unique feeding mechanism: instead of catching prey with teeth, they filter them from the water using a specialised hair-like structure called baleen. Their skulls and jaws are specially adapted for this style of feeding and are very different to those of the earliest whales which swam the Late Eocene seas.

In this talk, I shall endeavour to give a palaeontological perspective on the bowhead and other baleen whales. I will discuss how recent fossil finds from around the world are providing insight into how baleen filter-feeding evolved from toothed ancestors, as well as some of my own research investigating trends in marine vertebrate evolution using 3D models of fossil skulls.