I decided to write about whales today because I
reminded myself yesterday how much I like them. Once, years ago, I was
standing on the beach in California, looking out at the sea, when a whale of
some kind breached and then showed its flukes. I’m not sure what kind of whale
it was, I’m not a cetologist. I made some kind of remark about how you can't pay to
see something like that, meaning that I felt the experience was priceless, by
my jackass boyfriend at the time, the Redheaded Banjo Player Whom I Promised I’d
Never Write About, made some snarky remark about how I would say that, meaning
that I’m greedy and place to much importance on money. That was him projecting,
of course, because I had money and he did not and this injustice was a source
of much outrage for him.
Anyhoo.
Last week, paleontologists from the Calvert Marine Museum in
Southern Maryland excavated the six foot (1.83 meter), 1,000 pound (453.6 kg)
fossilized skull of an extinct baleen whale. The skull is 15 million years old,
according
to collections manager John Nance.
The skull was found in cliffs along the edge of the Potomac,
where some of the world’s only fossils from the Miocene epoch, 5 to 23 million
years ago, are found. The rest of the whale’s skeleton remains embedded in the cliff.
Nance told The Washington Post that
to find such a complete whale fossil was “pretty uncommon.”
Millions of years ago, the ancestors
of whales lived on land. The Pakicetus was the most primitive whale. It was
about the size of a dog and looked like one, too:
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| Image credit: Nobu Tamura |
It lived about 50 million years ago, was carnivorous and
drank fresh water.
About 49 million years ago, the Ambulocetus natans, an amphibious
ancestor of the whale, emerged. The first whales without legs appeared
48 to 35 million years ago.
Whales are mammals, as half the Internet pointed out to me
once when I referred to them as fish. I knew that they were mammals, of course,
I was just checking to see if you were paying attention. Half of you were.
Because they’re mammals, they can’t become unconscious, or
they’ll drown. This means that whales sleep with only half of their brain at a
time. This way they can use the other half to keep breathing and stuff.
Whales occupy a prominent place in the world’s mythologies. One Icelandic
legend tells of a man who blocked the blowhole of a whale with a stone, and
caused the whale to burst. The man was forbidden to go to sea for 20 years,
which must have been an awful punishment for someone from Iceland (I guess?),
because in the 19th year he couldn’t hold back any longer, and went
to sea anyway. A whale killed him.
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| That's what you get. Image credit: Whit Welles |
Neurological studies of the brains of whales have found that
they possess spindle neurons previously found only in hominid species. In
humans, these cells perform social and emotional functions, including the
ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and to understand that
others may have mental states, beliefs, intentions, and desires different from
one’s own. These cells are also implicated in the ability to form judgments.
Evidence suggests that they perform similar functions in the brains of whales.
