I just found this incredible! We were at a class yesterday about animal migrations and the teacher brought out this HUGE baleen plate! I had no idea they were this big! It made me realize how enormous whales are!
Baleen are keratin plates and are an adaption for filter feeding in baleen whales. A whale can have several HUNDRED of these plates in their mouth!
If you go to this site and scroll down to "Baleen", you can learn more about these amazingly large plates. (Photo above is a close up which shows how one end is frayed and it felt kind of like stiff hair)
Wow! That's hard to grasp!!!
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