Crossword clues for rorqual
rorqual
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Rorqual \Ror"qual\, n. [Norw. rorqualus a whale with folds.] (Zo["o]l.) A very large North Atlantic whalebone whale ( Physalus antiquorum, or Bal[ae]noptera physalus). It has a dorsal fin, and strong longitudinal folds on the throat and belly. Called also razorback.
Note: It is one of the largest of the whales, somethimes becoming nearly one hundred feet long, but it is more slender than the right whales, and is noted for its swiftness. The name is sometimes applied to other related species of finback whales.
Wiktionary
n. Any whale with longitudinal skin folds running from below the mouth to the navel, allowing the capacity of the mouth to expand greatly when feeding.
WordNet
n. any of several baleen whales of the family Balaenopteridae having longitudinal grooves on the throat and a small pointed dorsal fin [syn: razorback]
Wikipedia
Rorquals (Balaenopteridae) are the largest group of baleen whales, a family with nine extant species in two genera. They include what is believed to be the largest animal that has ever lived, the blue whale, which can reach , and the fin whale, which reaches ; even the smallest of the group, the northern minke whale, reaches .
Rorquals take their name from French rorqual, which derives from the Norwegian word røyrkval, meaning "furrow whale".
Usage examples of "rorqual".
Nor did they find their families or sweethearts, not a single one of the eight hundred inhabitants of Rorqual Towne.
It flew steerage in a suborbital cargo craft, the Rorqual, then maglevved to her over the mountains from Edmonton.
Always, at flood time, the instinct to be free rose in them, filling them with a wild yearning to buck the mountainous tide of water, to swim fiercely to the top, there to sport with the large Gamma Rorqual, that ferocious whale-like mammal with the long spiked tooth from which only the hipps, because of their hard, outer shell, were safe.
When the roll call was complete, Commander Rorqual Marchant, his exec, buzzed him on their private circuit.
Once inside the wardroom, Drake introduced the terrestrials to Rorqual Marchant, Professors Alvarez and St.
The ulna and radius in the rorquals are also comparatively longer than in the baleen whales.
In the skull, the supraorbital processes of the frontals are broader in the rorquals than in others, and the olfactory fossa is less elongated.
During the past year, over a hundred lives had been saved when cetaceans-chiefly the smaller dolphins but in one documented case, a lesser rorqual whale-towed shipwrecked humans to safety.
The rorquals included the largest, swiftest and un doubtedly the most intelligent of whales.
Consequently if, by exceptional good luck, a sailing ship managed to catch and kill one of the rorquals, the monster promptly sank, and that was that.
About 1860 they turned their hard blue eyes upon the rorquals and put their Viking minds to work.
Within ten years they had found the means to doom, not only the rorquals, but all surviving great whales in all the oceans of the earth.
In 1904 there were eighteen such factories on the shores^of Newfoundland alone, processing an average of twelve hundred whales, most of them rorquals, every year!
All rorquals have these slits, which in the Fin number about a hundred.
In 1964 he expanded the plant to handle whales and, using Norwegian catching ships and Norwegian crews, began going after the rorquals which had reappeared in the seas between Nova Scotia and southern Newfound land.