Spying on Whales - Nick Pyenson

Staff Pick

Pyenson is a paleontologist and “reading whale bones is what I do,” he modestly says. “Their bones all tell stories…about where whales came from.” Translated into human language, these tales are full of superlatives: whales outweigh dinosaurs and are the largest creatures ever to have lived on Earth; their fabled songs, which can travel some 900 miles underwater, are “the most acoustically powerful sound made by any organism.” These stories are fascinating for what we know—whales descended from four-legged land-dwelling animals the size of a dog —and what we don’t: when and how did they develop their tremendous sizes? What’s to stop them from getting still larger? Having survived the devastating toll of 19th and 20th-century whaling, can they adapt to climate change? Pyenson takes us through the Smithsonian’s collection of fossil mammals, the largest in the world, with attendant lessons on whale anatomy, feeding habits, migratory range, and the many mysteries particular to the different species of whales, as well as on field trips to Panama, Alaska, the Hvalfjörður whaling station west of Iceland, and the amazing Cerro Ballena site in the Atacama region of Chile. There he helped excavate four different layers of whale skeletons that research showed had been laid down in different episodes thousands of years apart during the Miocene. It was an unprecedented find, and Pyenson mines it for information about the past, present, and future of whales. But there’s only so much we can learn from bones. So far, “no one has ever recorded the beating heart of a wild whale,” Pyenson notes. May he be the first.

Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures By Nick Pyenson Cover Image
$27.00
ISBN: 9780735224568
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: Viking - June 26th, 2018