In the Tyrol region of Austria, it was said that if a sunbeam were to fall on a maiden entering womanhood, she would be carried away in the belly of a whale.

While fledglings can fall prey to rats, cats or the Arctic Fox, healthy adults are threatened only by greater raptors such as the Golden Eagle and the White-tailed Eagle, and more rarely by the Orca whale.

Most whale carcasses never reach the coast and are scavenged or decomposed enough to sink to the ocean bottom, where the carcass forms the basis of a unique local ecosystem called whale fall.

Adding a rat and a walrus will probably reduce the support for the ( whale, ( cat, monkey )) clade, because the rat and the walrus may fall within this clade, or outside of the clade, and since these five animals are all relatively closely related, there should be more uncertainty about their relationships.

It was completely purchased by the Lisboete Francisco Marcelino dos Reis in 1940, where for the next 40 years it prospered as the Centro Nevrálgico da Baleação no Faial, then declining in importance with the fall of whaling in the region, and closing completely in 1981 ( even as the last whale was hunted in 1987 ).

However, Sigurður was able to continue to collect whale penises by harvesting them from the 12 – 16 whales that fall victim to stranding on the Icelandic coast each year.

A whale fall is a whale carcass that has fallen to the ocean floor.

* Craig Smith's paper on whale fall ecology ( University of Hawaii )

They finally plan to bring down the helicopter by having Cassie morph into a humpback whale and fall onto the helicopter.

The scent of amber was originally derived from emulating the scent of ambergris and / or labdanum but due to the endangered status of the sperm whale the scent of amber is now largely derived from labdanum.

The skin and blubber from a whale which was boiled was a delicacy and so was walrus.

The first known usage of the term blue whale was in Melville's Moby-Dick, which only mentions it in passing and does not specifically attribute it to the species in question.

When the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by a whale in 1820, the captain opted to sail 3000 miles upwind to Chile rather than 1400 miles downwind to the Marquesas because he had heard the Marquesans were cannibals.

At Ostia, in front of a crowd of spectators, Claudius fought a killer whale which was trapped in the harbor.

Cetus is Latin and is used in biological names to mean " whale "; its original meaning, " large sea animal ", was more general.

Two wolphins currently live at the Sea Life Park in Hawaii ; the first was born in 1985 from a male false killer whale and a female bottlenose.

Their intention was to expose what they considered embezzlement of the meat collected during whale hunts.

However, on May 8, 2010, a sighting of a gray whale was confirmed off the coast of Israel in the Mediterranean Sea, leading some scientists to think they might be repopulating old breeding grounds that have not been used for centuries.

In his 1835 history of Nantucket Island, Obed Macy wrote that in the early pre-1672 colony a whale of the kind called " scragg " entered the harbor and was pursued and killed by the settlers.

Van Deinse points out that the " scrag whale ", described by P. Dudley in 1725 as one of the species hunted by the early New England whalers, was almost certainly the gray whale.

In May 2010, a gray whale was sighted off the Mediterranean shore of Israel.

The same whale was sighted again on June 8, 2010, off the coast of Barcelona, Spain.

In January 2011, a gray whale that had been tagged in the western population was tracked as far east as the eastern population range off the coast of British Columbia.

By 1934, the western gray whale was near extinction.

More ships followed in the two following winters, after which gray whaling in the bay was nearly abandoned because " of the inferior quality and low price of the dark-colored gray whale oil, the low quality and quantity of whalebone from the gray, and the dangers of lagoon whaling.

Van Deinse points out the " scrag whale ", described by P. Dudley in 1725, as one target of early New England whalers, was almost certainly the gray whale.

In his 1835 history of Nantucket Island, Obed Macy wrote that in the early pre-1672 colony, a whale of the kind called " scragg " entered the harbor and was pursued and killed by the settlers.

In 1972, a three-month-old gray whale named Gigi ( II ) was captured for brief study by Dr. David W. Kenney, and then released near San Diego.

In January 1997, the newborn baby whale J. J. was found helpless near the coast of Los Angeles, California, long and in weight.

The principal product of the oil in the 19th century was kerosene, which quickly replaced whale oil for illuminating purposes in the United States.

The first published description of the blue whale comes from Robert Sibbald's Phalainologia Nova ( 1694 ).

Other common names for the blue whale have included Sibbald's rorqual ( after Sibbald, who first described the species ), the great blue whale and the great northern rorqual.

* 2006 – Witnesses report seeing a bottlenose whale swimming in the River Thames, the first time the species had been seen in the Thames since records began in 1913.

Konrad Gessner wrote the first scientific description of a killer whale in his " Fish book " of 1558, based on examination of a dead stranded animal in the Bay of Greifswald that had attracted a great deal of local interest.

The killer whale is one of 35 species in the oceanic dolphin family, which first appeared about 11 million years ago.

It is most likely that these birds, which were encountered by the first human settlers of the Americas, would feed on stranded whale carcasses.

Industrial whaling emerged with organised fleets in the 17th century ; competitive national whaling industries in the 18th and 19th centuries ; and the introduction of factory ships along with the concept of whale harvesting in the first half of the 20th century.

In April 2009 Greenland landed its first bowhead whale in nearly forty years after being given a quota by the IWC in 2008 for two whales a year until 2012.

Its first part is thought to derive from a word such as Dutch walvis ' whale '.

There are 37 species of toothed whale, which include all six genera of the family Ziphiidae, and 21 species of oceanic dolphin, including the Australian Snubfin Dolphin, a species first described in 2005.

It featured a blue whale, the first full-cast of a blue whale ever created.

The first backscratchers were used by the Inuit and were carved from whale teeth.

The Kondole was the first whale according to Aboriginal myth.

The first light came from 9 whale oil lamps and was magnified by a large glass reflector.

The whale ships from Leith brought the very first penguins to Edinburgh Zoo around 1900.

Cuvier is commemorated in the naming of several animals ; they include Cuvier's beaked whale ( which he first thought to be extinct ), Cuvier's Gazelle, Cuvier's toucan, Cuvier's Bichir, Galeocerdo cuvier ( tiger shark ), and Anolis cuvieri, a lizard from Puerto Rico.

The first element is hvalr which means " whale " and the last element is sund which means " strait " or " sound ".

Kelly's animation can be seen in Pinocchio when Gepetto is first seen inside Monstro the whale, fishing ; in Fantasia when Bacchus is seen drunkenly riding a donkey during the Beethoven /" Pastoral Symphony " sequence ; and in " Dumbo " of the ringmaster and during bits of the crows ' sequence ; and his drawings are especially recognizable in " The Reluctant Dragon " of the little boy, and in the Mickey Mouse short " The Little Whirlwind " when Mickey is running from the larger tornado.

When the ship was struck by a whale on November 20, 1820, he joined the boat of the first mate, Owen Chase, who later wrote about the incident in the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, the book that would inspire Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick.

Indeed, though Barratt and Fielding had worked together in the past, the first seeds of the Boosh were sown whilst working as part of Lee's Edinburgh show King Dong vs Moby Dick in which Barratt and Fielding played a giant penis and a whale, respectively.

One particular situation where he is shown as a monomaniac is in the crew's first encounter with the whale, stating: