Category:Whale Friends: Difference between revisions

A list of all Friends based on large cetaceans of the infraorder Cetacea, commonly known as whales. The term "whale" as it is being used here is informal—there is no taxon specifically for "big whales"—but there are two extant parvorders which are composed of animals typically called "whales":

• Mysticeti, which is comprised of the baleen whales, such as the blue whale and humpback whale.
• Odontoceti, which is comprised of the toothed whales, such as the beluga and the sperm whale.

The term "whale" can also be applied to some extinct taxa which contain ancestors to modern extant whales, such as Basilosaurus.

While dolphins and porpoises also fall under the taxonomic definition of "whale", as they belong to the parvorder Odontoceti, the list below omits them (and thus also omits the killer whale, or orca, as it too is a dolphin), as per the informal distinction between "whale" and "dolphin" seen in common vernacular.