In these several respects they resemble the plates of baleen in the mouth of a whale.

But towards the extremity of the beak they differ much, as they project inward, instead of straight downward.

The entire head of the shoveller, though incomparably less bulky, is about one-eighteenth of the length of the head of a moderately large Balaenoptera rostrata, in which species the baleen is only nine inches long; so that if we were to make the head of the shoveller as long as that of the Balaenoptera, the lamellae would be six inches in length, that is, two-thirds of the length of the baleen in this species of whale.