Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A suborder of Cete or Cetacea, having no teeth developed, the upper jaw being provided with baleen plates; the balænoid whales or whalebone-whales: opposed to Denticete.
  • Having baleen instead of teeth in the upper jaw; belonging to the Mysticete.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) Any right whale, or whalebone whale. See cetacea.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun zoology Any of the baleen whales (of suborder Mysticeti)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[New Latin mysticētus, from Greek mustikētos, alteration of (ho) mūs to kētos, (the) whale (called) the mouse : mūs, mouse; see mūs- in Indo-European roots + kētos, whale.]

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Examples

  • They are the eight or so Balaenoptera species of the mysticete family Balaenopteridae*, all of which open their jaws wide to engulf masses of prey and possess a highly distensible throat pouch and extensible longitudinal grooves on the throat and belly.

    A 6 ton model, and a baby that puts on 90 kg a day: rorquals part I Darren Naish 2006

  • Moving back to the morphology of the rorqual lower jaw, a tall, well-developed coronoid process – way larger than that of any other mysticete – projects from each jaw bone and forms the attachment site for a tendinous part of the temporalis muscle, termed the frontomandibular stay.

    From cigar to elongated, bloated tadpole: rorquals part II Darren Naish 2006

  • They are the eight or so Balaenoptera species of the mysticete family Balaenopteridae*, all of which open their jaws wide to engulf masses of prey and possess a highly distensible throat pouch and extensible longitudinal grooves on the throat and belly.

    Archive 2006-10-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • Moving back to the morphology of the rorqual lower jaw, a tall, well-developed coronoid process – way larger than that of any other mysticete – projects from each jaw bone and forms the attachment site for a tendinous part of the temporalis muscle, termed the frontomandibular stay.

    Archive 2006-10-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • Even so, Mammalodon was a fairly specialized mysticete that lived about ten million years after the hypothesized time of origin for its group.

    ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science 2010

  • "The mysticete brain is still a land of mystery," Marino says.

    New Scientist - Online News 2010

  • "The mysticete brain is still a land of mystery," Marino says.

    New Scientist - Online News 2010

  • The morphology and systematics of (Cetacea: Mysticeti), a toothed mysticete from the Oligocene of Australia TrackBacks

    ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science 2010

  • Mammalodon to not only other fossil mysticete whales, but to archaeocetes such as Zygorhiza).

    ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science 2010

  • (Interestingly, though, Fitzgerald notes that there is a collection of 34 million year old fossil whales from South Carolina that have been said to be the earliest mysticetes, yet are quite different from the basilosaurids and other mysticete whales.

    ScienceBlogs Channel : Life Science 2010

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