Ahab's Rolling Sea by Richard J. King

Author:Richard J. King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

FOSSIL HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE

After showing off a floor-to-ceiling cast of the fossilized bones of an extinct baleen whale that is about twenty-six million years old, Fordyce (sneezes) walks me over to one of his prized finds. This is behind glass: a “shark-toothed dolphin” skull that is over twenty-four million years old. It has triangular, serrated teeth rather than the more conical teeth of toothed whales today. This shark-toothed dolphin might have echolocated and perhaps fed on the giant penguins of its epoch.

This shark-toothed dolphin skull also looks to me like the head of a massive crocodile. Or even the skull of the basilosaurus that Ishmael describes in “The Fossil Whale.” Fordyce says that Ishmael’s was a true story, one that actually helps explain why this shark-toothed dolphin skull in front of us is not a reptile. In 1839 an American physician named Richard Harlan brought to London some fossilized fragments from a specimen in Alabama that he believed to be a giant reptile. He had named it basilosaurus, which means “king of the reptiles.” Fordyce says, “Harlan was widely interpreted as a bit useless, but he would have been struggling with what resources he had at the time.” Harlan packed the teeth, perhaps rolled in flannel, and brought them across the Atlantic to London where at the Royal College of Surgeons Richard Owen (“who was really quite brilliant,” Fordyce says) examined the remains of this basilosaurus specimen. Owen noticed that the teeth were worn down. Reptile and shark teeth have evolved to fall out, while these fossilized teeth had two distinct roots to anchor it into sockets in the jaw, like mammals. Owen proposed to change the name to Zeuglodon, which means “yoked tooth.” This name did not stick, and scientists today recognize the first naming, however inappropriate. A few years after Owen’s identification that it was actually an early whale—one of the first fully aquatic cetaceans, it turns out—a fossiliferous collector named Albert Koch collected enough basilosaurus fossils to build, with perhaps other bones and a few rocks, his own extinct “sea serpent.” Spurring international debate as to its veracity, involving the likes of Richard Owen and Charles Lyell, Koch took his skeleton creation to New York City in 1845, then to Boston and abroad, exhibiting it as “Hydrarchos” and playing off the Leviathan in Job that lived before the time of Noah’s flood.13 (See fig. 40.)

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