But even if you have never given these creatures much consideration, spend some time in this show and you will begin to see why they have haunted so many seafaring cultures, and why, even after being hunted to near extinction, the largest of their species still exude a commanding power and mystery.
Of course, immensity comes into play. The skeleton of a 58.4-foot-long male sperm whale — collected in 2003 as a result of a mass stranding of whales on a beach in West Auckland, New Zealand — is suspended at the exhibition’s center, adjacent to a smaller female. They loom over the video kiosks, wall panels and specimens, as if daring anything to come too close.
Nearby, children can climb inside a plastic model of a blue whale’s heart (which, in a live whale, can weigh more than 1,400 pounds). You can use touch screens to examine the internal organs of whales. But these displays are in the shadow of the chambers and curves of whalebone filling the high-ceilinged gallery.
More amazing than size, though, is what we see when we look more closely. These two sperm whales are stripped of the oils and monumental blubber that made them such valuable plunder for fuel seekers, revealing their inner structure. Yet while skeletons generally seem like the frames of living shapes, that is not the case here. The cubic bulk of the whale’s head is gone. The top of the skull is actually a concave scoop of curiously thin plates that thrust forward and split apart, looking like a forked bird’s beak. And while the bottom of the jaw is lined with thick, close-set teeth, it is as peculiarly narrow as it is long, like a protuberance designed for probing.
And the skeleton’s overall shape? Appendages looking like little hands protrude from its sides, like forgotten limbs. The spine sleekly curves, shrinking toward the tail. The animal seems like something that slithers with the currents rather than plows the deep; it even has some resemblances to a bird or a lizard. But we know otherwise. It is a mammal. It breathes air. And it lives like a fish.
So this is the largest toothed predator of the animal kingdom? It is as if having distilled the whale into its structural essence, we end up with something even more mysterious, testing the boundaries of all familiar categories. And I haven’t even described the most startling sights here, offered almost too soon to be absorbed, right after entering the exhibition.
This show is unusual for this museum since it originated elsewhere, at the
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, which has one of the largest whale collections in the world. But in its original form, the exhibition seems to have devoted almost as much attention to the use of these creatures by
New Zealand’s indigenous Maori as to the world’s cetaceans — an order of more than 80 species of living whales, dolphins and porpoises — and their ancestors.
Bilingual Maori signage remains, along with a disproportionate attention to that culture’s homage to whales. (The curator for this material is Rhonda Paku of the New Zealand museum.) But the American museum’s curators, including John J. Flynn, Frick curator of fossil mammals, have shifted the emphasis. They have added important fossil evidence from the Museum of Natural History, along with American whaling artifacts (including the logbook from the whaler William Rotch, sailing out of New Bedford, Mass., in the early 1830s).
Two cases of whale-themed artifacts from the museum’s collection from indigenous cultures in the Arctic, South America and the Pacific Northwest are also here, including a killer whale mask from British Columbia, an ancient Peruvian trumpet decorated with a killer whale carrying a severed human head, and an Inuit engraving of whales on a walrus tusk. These objects provide a larger context for the exhibition’s elaborate display of a Maori pataka (storehouse), in which whalebone weapons and cloak pins are shown.
Whale myths seem pretty nigh
universal.
Ultimately, though, these displays don’t let us fully comprehend the cultural significance of whales, even for the Maori; we simply are not given enough context. Indigenous peoples function here mostly as an environmental chastisement, which, presented with the facts, seems well deserved.
“At the peak of U.S. whaling, in 1853,” we learn, “Americans killed more than 8,000 whales.” But in the 20th century, about 350,000 blue whales were killed by the whale trade, leaving only about 2,000 alive. “It was estimated,” we read, “that Japanese, Danish, British, Dutch and Soviet Russian fleets collectively killed a fifth of the whales in the Southern Ocean in the 1957-58 season alone.” By the 1970s, the conservation movement had gained ground.
But we cannot feel the extent of that loss from the indigenous artifacts. Instead it emerges from the exhibition’s attentiveness to fossil evidence and biology, where we can glimpse the origins of the whale’s power and mystery.
The first object we see here, in fact, is an enormous skull
found in the Gobi Desert in 1923, belonging to Andrewsarchus mongoliensis, an animal that probably walked on all fours, possessed hooves and fur, and might have been 12 feet long and 6 feet high, “the largest meat-eating land mammal ever.” It was, we learn, likely from the same branch of the mammal family tree as hippos, and from the same animal group as deer, pigs and camels. It was also an ancestor of the whale.
We ordinarily think of evolution as leading creatures out of the sea, but here the reverse happened: whales evolved from four-footed land mammals beginning some 55 million years ago, in the midst of an era of global heating. The “first whale,” we are told, was the snoutish, four-legged
Pakicetus attocki. Such animals ultimately became “sea invaders” and diversified further. Some whales, with teeth, came to use sound for navigation; others developed plates of baleen, fine fringes of nail-like fibers in their mouths to trap swarms of small prey.
This strange evolutionary path, leading from land back to the sea, must leave a subliminal trace affecting human perceptions of whales (along with dolphins and porpoises). In Maori legend, whales are ridden by powerful and magical beings, as horses and land animals might have been. Many cultures also have stories of humans swallowed by whales and dwelling within them, as if there were some intimate connections between our realms.
Whales’ mammalian skeletons seem to speak of multiple worlds, their strange skulls hosting cavities and pathways that allow the production of
underwater sound. In dolphins, air is forced through vibrating flaps of flesh; the sound is transmitted through their foreheads’ fatty tissue. Toothed whales direct sound by bouncing it off air sacs in their nasal cavities; a sperm whale’s nose is at least a quarter of the length of its body. You can listen to such sounds here, ranging from clicks and squeals to the deep
trumpeting of the blue whale that can be heard 620 miles away.
Sniff here, too, at a
chunk of ambergris, “gray amber,” once used in the ancient Middle East as a spice and incense, and later as a fixative for perfumes. “You might have heard that sperm whales vomit up ambergris,” we are told. “Since it forms in the intestines, however, it’s more likely to exit the whale at the other end.”
How could such animals not be sacred and mysterious? All categories are confounded and expectations overturned. We begin to understand whales through the archaeology and analysis of science, but before their reality, we stand humbled.
Follow Edward Rothstein on Twitter, twitter.com/EdRothstein.
“Whales: Giants of the Deep” is on view through Jan. 5 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street; (212) 769-5100, amnh.org.
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