Skull was donated by an Inuit hunter in 1990. This is an Inside Science story. (Inside Science) -- A mysterious whale skull came from the first and only known hybrid of a beluga and a narwhal, a ...

In a new paper published today (June 20) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers confirmed that the skull does indeed belong to the only known specimen of a hybrid beluga-narwhal.

The narwhal-beluga hybrid skull. Mikkel Høegh Post/Natural History Museum Of Denmark In the 1980s, a subsistence hunter caught three unusual-looking whales in Greenland’s Disko Bay. They had ...

Because of its teeth, the hybrid probably had a diet more like a walrus or bearded seal than a narwhal or a beluga.Credit...Eline Lorenzen Her lab extracted DNA from the dust of its teeth and ...

Skulls of (a) a narwhal (b) the hybrid analyzed in the study, and (c) a beluga, show how different the teeth of narwhals and belugas are, and the unusual nature of the hybrid's teeth. (Mikkel ...

Using DNA and stable isotope analysis, scientists at the university were able to surmise that the skull belonged to a male hybrid that had a narwhal mom and a beluga whale dad. The hybrid has ...

Both Narwhals are beluga whales are found in the Arctic ocean ... The researchers found that it belonged to a first-generation hybrid between the two species. It is however unclear whether ...

(Read more about how hybrids happen.) Beluga whales and narwhals split on the evolutionary tree around five million years ago, but sometimes the species cross paths in western Greenland’s Disko Bay.

Skulls of (a) a narwhal (b) the hybrid analyzed in the study, and (c) a beluga, show how different the teeth of narwhals and belugas are, and the unusual nature of the hybrid’s teeth.

Now, they can. In a new paper published today (June 20) in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers confirmed that the skull does indeed belong to the only known specimen of a hybrid beluga-narwhal ...