Spying on Whales. Nick Pyenson

      

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

      Copyright © 2018 by Smithsonian Institution

      Design by Anna Morrison; Illustrations by Alex Boersma

      First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC in 2018 as Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures

      The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008244460

      Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008244484

      Version: 2019-04-18

       Dedication

       Every author writes with a very specific reader in mind.

       I wrote this book for you.

       And for my family.

       Epigraph

      What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we’re blue.

      —Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

      For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

      —Henry Beston, The Outermost House

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

      Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Prologue

PART I: PAST

1. How to Know a Whale

2. Mammals Like No Other

3. The Stories Bones Tell

4. Time Travel on the Fossil Whale Highway

       5. The Afterlife of a Whale

       6. Rock Picks and Lasers

       7. Cracking the Case of Cerro Ballena

       PART II: PRESENT

       8. The Age of Giants

       9. The Ocean’s Utmost Bones

       10. A Discovery at Hvalfjörður

       11. Physics and Flensing Knives

       12. The Limits of Living Things

       PART III: FUTURE

       13. Arctic Time Machines

       14. Shifting Baselines

       15. All the Ways to Go Extinct

       16. Evolution in the Anthropocene

       17. Whalebone Junction

       Epilogue

       A Family Tree of Whales

       Notes

       Selected Bibliography

       Index