Baleen this issue. A whale's baleen plates play the most important role in its filter-feeding process. To feed, a baleen whale opens its mouth widely and scoops in dense shoals of prey (such as krill, copepods, small fish, and sometimes birds that happen to be near the shoals), together with large volumes of water. It then partly shuts its mouth and presses its tongue against its upper jaw, forcing the water to pass out sideways through the baleen, thus sieving out the prey, which it then swallows. People formerly used baleen (usually referred to as "whalebone") for making numerous items where
Baleen whale contain the Sei whale, Bryde's whale, Eden's whale, the blue whale, and Omura's whale. Cetotheriidae consists of only one living member: the pygmy right whale ("Caperea marginata"). The first descriptions date back to the 1840s of bones and baleen plates resembling a smaller version of the right whale, and was named "Balaena marginata". In 1864, it was moved into the genus "Caperea" after a skull of another specimen was discovered. Six years later, the pygmy right whale was classified under the family Neobalaenidae. Despite its name, the pygmy right whale is more genetically similar to rorquals and gray whales than