Hybrid Animals Are Not Nature’s Misfits

The whale’s teeth were what had caught molecular ecologist Eline Lorenzen’s attention. Of the 18 chompers lining the front of the skull’s mouth, some were twisted, not unlike a narwhal’s tusk. But the 30-year-old specimen, hidden away in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen, didn’t have a tusk at all.