274 WHALES 



down to small stumps in older animals. Like all other Odontocetes, Killers 

 never chew their prey but swallow it whole or in big pieces. Thus 

 Eschricht, while examining a 21 -foot Killer, discovered no less than 

 thirteen complete porpoises and fourteen seals in the first chamber 

 of its stomach (6^ feet x 4f feet). A fifteenth seal was found in the 

 animal's throat (Fig. 154). Other carnivores are known to eat compara- 

 tively huge meals. Thus the stomach of a wolf weighing 1 12 lb. was found 

 to contain 20 lb. of meat. 



Other Odontocetes have specialized on a diet of cuttlefish, and this is 

 particularly true of Beaked Whales {^iphiidae). Admittedly, some members 

 of this family, e.g. Bottlenose Whales, also feed on herring and krill, but 

 other species feed exclusively on cuttlefish. In contradistinction to fish, 

 cuttlefish are fairly slow and hence easily caught. Moreover they are fairly 

 soft, and their captors can dispense with the long row of sharp teeth 

 characteristic of most fish-eaters. In the Ziphiids, the number of teeth has, 

 in fact, become so greatly reduced that, to all intents and purposes, they 

 can be called toothless, though they are clearly descended from fish-eating 

 ancestors. Diochoticus, for instance, a Beaked Whale which lived 18 million 

 years ago and whose fossils were discovered in Patagonia, had long jaws 

 with twenty-three well-developed teeth in the upper and nineteen in the 

 lower jaw. Mioziphius, discovered in the Belgian Upper Miocene deposits, 

 and which must have lived about g million years ago, still had forty teeth 

 in the upper jaw, while the number of teeth in its lower jaw had by then 

 been reduced to two. On the other hand, ChoJieziphius, another Belgian 

 Upper Miocene fossil, had only a somewhat rudimentary set of sockets in 

 its upper jaw, and only two teeth in its lower jaw. 



Present-day Beaked Whales have the long jaws of their ancestors but 

 none of their teeth. They obviously seize the cuttlefish with the edges of 

 their jaws and then squeeze them back to the throat. (In older bulls, and 

 less frequently in adult cows, one or two teeth can occasionally be seen 

 to push through the lower gum.) (Fig. 155.) The only known exception 

 is Tasmacetus shepherdi, the first known speciraen of which was stranded in 

 New Zealand twenty years ago. It had nineteen fairly well-developed 

 teeth in its upper, and twenty-seven in its lower jaw. This otherwise little 

 known animal therefore had at least some of the striking characteristics 

 of its Miocene relatives. Moreover, it would be wrong to say that other 

 Beaked Whales are completely devoid of all signs of teeth. If we prepare 

 the jaws as carefully as Boschma did, or look at Fraser's excellent X-ray 

 pictures, we notice that the gum of each half of lower and upper jaws may 

 contain thirty-two very small loosely-fitted teeth on both sides (Fig. 156). 

 However, these teeth never break through the gum and are therefore 

 generally missed by casual observers. 



