Dead beached whale anatomy. Cutaway illustration of zoologists studying a dead beached whale, with its internal anatomy shown. A net is entangled with its tail, cutting deep into the skin. Whales are marine mammals that swim using their flippers and tails, and surface to breathe. The whale's skeleton is shown, along with its heart (red), lungs (pink), liver (brown), stomach (yellow) and kidneys (green). A flap of blubber has been cut out by a zoologist to show the thickness of this fatty layer (at upper right). This is a baleen whale, that feeds on plankton, and its baleen plates are seen in its mouth. The white areas around the whale's head are groupings of barnacles attached to its skin. |