Title: A Beautiful World™: Keep Narwhals Real | Minnesota Public Radio
Headings: Keep Narwhals Real!
Keep Narwhals Real!
Narwhals Are Real
The King of Teeth
An Extraordinary World of Sound
A Loud Threat
Seismic Mapping
Crowdsourcing scientific studies?
Blasting Begins in June 2016
Biographies

Content: They have the king of teeth" he says. " The most amazing tooth in the animal kingdom, by far." The King of Teeth
For years, the narwhal tusk was thought to be an insensate horn, used for hunting or mating displays but nobody knew for sure, until Dr. Martin Nweeia figured it out. By gathering ancient Inuit knowledge and combining it with cutting-edge research, he discovered a narwhal tusk is actually a tooth. Specifically, the left tooth on an adult male, which grows up to nine feet long, over half the narwhal's body. The tooth is perfectly straight at its axis, but spirals left on the surface. It's also weirdly soft and flexible, which Narweeia says the Inuit had told him narwhal tusks could bend, but he didn't believe it until years later, after it was painstakingly proven in a lab. " Everything they tell me turns out to be true," he says. " It takes us years to find out what they already know." "The most stunning discovery about narwhal tusks explained why they were packed tight with complex nerve bundles that connected directly to their brains and auditory systems.