Here’s An Odd One: The Skull Of The Only Known “narluga”, A Possible Narwhal/beluga Whale Hybrid.

Here’s an odd one: the skull of the only known “narluga”, a possible narwhal/beluga whale hybrid. It was killed by a Greenlandic hunter around 1987 and the skull was lying on top of a toolshed in 1990 when it was noticed by a visiting scientist. According to the hunter, the animal was a uniform grey color (as opposed to the mottled narwhal and the white beluga), with the tail of a narwhal but the pectoral flippers of a beluga whale.

The skull is larger than both parent species’ and its teeth a strange mixture of both. Narwhals don’t have teeth except for the single large tusk of the male, while beluga whales have a full set of smaller teeth. The narluga seems to have a full set of teeth but some of them are strangely elongated and oriented like narwhal tusks, as seen in the third picture. The unusual dentition didn’t seem to bother the animal since it reached a great size but it would presumably have been sterile as most hybrids are. No other examples of narwhal/beluga whale hybrids have been found.

The skull is currently housed at the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen.

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