EPILOGUE
The warm water of the Chesapeake Bay lapped over my feet as I walked behind my son, who scoured pebbles in the surf. I kept an eye on him as my colleague Dave Bohaska walked beside me. I knew that we stood a good chance of finding a few fossil shark teeth and some nice shells on this western side of the bay. The tall Calvert Cliffs, which line this part of the Chesapeake’s shoreline in Maryland, have produced hundreds of thousands of Miocene-age fossils, including many skulls and skeletons of fossil whales. All of my predecessors at the Smithsonian—people like Frederick True and Remington Kellogg—either knew about or collected fossil marine mammals here.
It was supposed to be a leisurely Sunday, and we held no high hopes for a significant find. I hadn’t brought any tools, and I mainly wanted to unplug and spend time outside with my son; maybe fossils would inspire him as they did me, but I wasn’t going to push it. Dave lives nearby, in the community of Scientists Cliffs, and he was happy to take us on a neighborhood walk. If nothing else, the community’s name alone is sufficiently auspicious for casual fossil finding.
Abruptly my son paused next to a block of sediment that had slid down to the beach. “Dad—what’s this?” he called. I walked up and knelt down for a closer look. Dave and I are both familiar enough with these kinds of anatomical riddles to immediately recognize that it was the snout of a whale. The rest of the skull was either still trapped high in the cliff face from which this block had tumbled or lost to the bay. On closer inspection, the right and left snout bones were strongly skewed, near where the face housed a biosonar apparatus. I thought that it probably belonged to Orycterocetus, a fossil sperm whale that Kellogg worked on extensively, especially from these rocks. “Well, gee,” Dave said, smiling. “Anders,” I said proudly, “you just found a fossil whale.” My son, then four years old, wasn’t quite sure what to make of the situation.
I stood up and exhaled. “Dammit,” I said softly. Deciding against bringing excavation gear guarantees that you’ll need it. No hammer, no plaster, no pickax. Dave and I traded glances. “It’s at tide level, fair game for collecting,” Dave remarked, implying that we were clear, legally, to do so for the Smithsonian. I reached into my day pack and pulled out a small knife; Dave had one too. We were losing daylight and didn’t have time to hike back to Dave’s house for more tools. The tide was coming in; who knew if the snout would still be there the next day. I looked at our pocketknives and considered the muddy, waterlogged sediment. “All right. Let’s do it,” I said, and we started digging.
Sometimes finds of happenstance are curiosities; sometimes they are important scientific discoveries and should be collected. I thought the snout was probably the latter, well worth the trouble. Sperm whales have one of the deepest evolutionary histories of any living group of whales, stretching from the iconic sperm whale of Moby-Dick back to fossils from the Oligocene, more than 23 million years ago. While sperm whales in the fossil record may differ in details of tooth size and subtle sutures of the skull, they all share a bowl-like concavity on their face housing the junk and case—special terms for their biosonar organs, owing to nineteenth-century whalers who sought their fine and lucrative oil. Fossil sperm whales can be found all around the world, represented mainly by large, handsome teeth, sometimes the weight and size of a wine bottle. We had found them at Cerro Ballena; today’s sperm whales’ polished teeth are the stuff of scrimshaw and lore. Ivory anvils of ten thousand squid meals.
We scraped away sediment to guess the dimensions, in keeping with an Orycterocetus snout. We would need to carry it up several staircases to where we’d parked. The snout had no teeth with it, unfortunately, just deep grooves on the palate, where they once were held in place by ligaments. Still, it was more than I had ever found at the cliffs. I took off my T-shirt to make a sling for the block.
As we trenched out the snout, I occasionally shot a glance at my son, who chucked handfuls of rock into the tide, lacking anything more substantive to do. I thought about how at one point about fifteen million years ago, this snout belonged to a living, breathing sperm whale. This long-extinct individual whale had a life history, a diet, and it belonged to a vanished ecosystem; I wondered about the owner of this snout, and thought about questions that paleontologists would have trouble answering: Was it a mother? Was it part of a society, with culture? Would this Miocene whale have been able to communicate with its descendants alive now? Did it sleep vertically, in a floating forest of leviathans, just below the surface, the way sperm whales sometimes do today?
We individuate whales as a way to know to them, to chip away at their mystery, whether it’s a fragment of skull, the unique squiggle of an acoustic click’s waveform, or a distinctive mottling on a tail fluke. We give individual whales familiar names or alphanumerics to differentiate them from their kin, as if that somehow circumscribes their enigma, easing our inquiry into their history and lives. Individual whales matter because they sometimes carry the superlatives that scientists bestow; individuals are, after all, tied to the records of the largest, the deepest, the first, and, sometimes, the last.
But this is how science happens: collect these individuals together, under a specific question, or a line of inquiry, and you can build a broader picture that begins to illuminate the inaccessibility of whales. I interrogate individuals when I pick up a skull or a bone and ask, “Who are you?” That’s my starting point for discovery. And I know that chain of questioning is not unique to me—it’s the same question asked of the plug of tissue stuck in a biopsy dart, or through the observation panel of an aquarium, gazing at a captive dolphin. Who are they? That’s ultimately what we all want to know about whales.
Later that evening, my son in bed, I headed to the National Museum of Natural History in downtown Washington, D.C., to haul the block containing the snout to my laboratory. I rolled a cart over to my parked car in the dark and unloaded the skull bones, still wrapped in a soaked T-shirt. Earlier that day, the fossil had been an anonymous hunk of bone stuck in marl. Now it would be prepared, cleaned, measured, studied, and preserved for generations to come. It would receive its own catalog number—USNM 559329—with my son recorded in the database as its collector. It would join the ranks of thousands of other fossil specimens like it at the Smithsonian, each one with a story to tell. Those stories are discoveries waiting to be made—some mundane, others that could rewrite textbooks—and that’s what makes science so much fun. Teasing out the facts from the unknown depends on asking the right question; the answer might tell you a lot about the past, present, and future of whales.