A mysterious carcass washed ashore in New Zealand last week, fueling speculation about sea monsters and dinosaurs. The rotting animal was discovered by a group on four-wheel vehicles speeding along the beach in Bay of Plenty.

Ever wish you could see sounds? Now you can.

Bryant Austin is a portrait photographer. But instead of capturing people with his camera, he dives underwater to create these incredible portraits of whales. His photographs capture the entirety of these huge mammals' bodies, or focus on the details of their expressive faces and eyes. There is something enormously…

Baleen is part of a unique filtration system that allows enormous whales to live off of relatively tiny creatures. Baleen plates are often shed by a whale or released after their death, and harvested for use in art and consumer goods. As you can imagine, baleen harvesting was widespread before the 20th century, but…

During the first half of the previous decade, workers at a highway-widening project in California's Leguna Canyon uncovered a huge batch of fossils. Because the state of California mandates the presence of a paleontologist and an archaeologist at such digs, many of these fossils were identified as unique and scurried…

Ever wondered what a whirlwind of emotions looks like? Wonder no more. Watch this girl struggle to keep an even emotional keel as the whales around her slosh and bob ever-closer to her and her dad's canoe. The combination of suppressed terror and full-bore wonderment is insanely fun to watch — not to mention the…

Behold the awesome power of the Fail Whale, alive and free in the sky! Believe it or not, this giant beast is actually a giant 98-foot kite!

At long last, scientists have finally caught a glimpse of one of this planet's most elusive species, the spade-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii). In 2010, a mother and calf washed up on shore in New Zealand, but biologists had initially assumed it was the more commonly known Gray's beaked whale. But…

There's a theory that all the noise that we're pumping into the seas — sonar, drilling, and more — may be disorienting for sea mammals like whales that navigate by sound. But there's something else that humans already did to the ocean, according to a new study. We killed off almost all the mammals that were there to …

Ever fallen asleep standing up? Then you know what it's like to snooze like a sperm whale.