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: For years nobody knew what their tusks were for. Then a Harvard dental expert discovered they're way more complicated than anybody thought." That Harvard dental expert is Dr. Martin Nweeia. He's a country dentist in Sharon, Connecticut and a clinical professor at Harvard. He's a National Geographic Explorer and also one of the world's foremost authorities on the narwhal. " 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.