Bowhead whales are a superlative species with a problem. The cetacean with the world's largest mouth and longest mammalian lifespan gets too hot. But help is at hand. It turns out it has an organ on the roof of its mouth -bizarrely similar to a penis - that helps it cool down. In the early 1990s, Alexander Werth of Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and colleagues dissected the . heads of seven bowhead whales, killed by Alaskan hgnters. The results, just published, show that each whale had a rod of tissue running along the middle of its palate made of soft, spongy tissue. The rod is filled with blood vessels, and the team says it probably swells and becomes rigid when extra blood is pumped through it - much like a penis. They call it the corpus cavernosum maxillaris (The Anatomical Record. DOI: 10.1002/ ar.22681).
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