The minke whale (/ˈmɪnki/), or lesser rorqual, is a species complex of baleen whale. The two species of minke whale are the common (or northern) minke whale and the Antarctic (or southern) minke whale. The minke whale was first described by the Danish naturalist Otto Fabricius in 1780, who assumed it must be an already known species and assigned his specimen to Balaena rostrata, a name given to the northern bottlenose whale by Otto Friedrich Müller in 1776. In 1804, Bernard Germain de Lacépède described a juvenile specimen of Balaenoptera acuto-rostrata. The name is a partial translation of Norwegian minkehval, possibly after a Norwegian whaler named Meincke, who mistook a northern minke whale for a blue whale.

Most modern classifications split the minke whale into two species;

• Common minke whale or northern minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata)

• Antarctic minke whale or southern minke whale (Balaenoptera bonaerensis).

Taxonomists further categorize the common minke whale into two or three subspecies; the North Atlantic minke whale, the North Pacific minke whale and dwarf minke whale. All minke whales are part of the rorquals, a family that includes the humpback whale, the fin whale, the Bryde's whale, the sei whale and the blue whale. The junior synonyms for B. acutorostrata are B. davidsoni (Scammon 1872), B. minimia (Rapp, 1837) and B. rostrata (Fabricius, 1780). There is one synonym for B. bonaerensis - B. huttoni (Gray 1874).

Writing in his 1998 classification, Rice recognized two of the subspecies of the common minke whale - B. a. scammoni (Scammon's minke whale) and a further taxonomically unnamed subspecies found in the Southern Hemisphere, the dwarf minke whale.

These galleries are of the Minke Whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) off the coasts of the Kuril Islands Russia