Spying on Whales. Nick Pyenson

her way again, she smiled, breaking the tension. “Why don’t we go see all those whales at Cerro Ballena?” she offered. “I’ll call Tuareg to show us around. He and Jim are over there now. You’re not going to believe it.”

      Actually, I thought that I had good reason not to believe it, especially if it involved the man who calls himself Tuareg. His real name is Mario Suárez, and he is probably the single best fossil finder I have ever known. He demurs when asked, but Mario’s self-appointed nickname is clearly meant to evoke the stoic Berber people of the Sahara—an image he routinely betrays by losing his cell phone (he has lost more than a dozen) and completely going AWOL when needed (usually found at the nearest bakery). But at the time, we were strictly in his domain, working under his collecting permit, which he held as curator at the local paleontology museum in the town of Caldera.

      Tuareg had e-mailed me earlier that year about a place he started to call Cerro Ballena, where he said complete whale skeletons had been found, but I’d had a hard time discerning much from afar. I remembered having seen the site on a past visit, a sloping road cut of the Pan-American Highway that trenched through a layer cake of orange and tan marine rocks. The only fossils I had noted were a smattering of skull bones from a large whale, likely a baleen one. Locals had tried tunneling out the bones, unsuccessfully, next to graffiti carved in the soft sandstone. None too auspicious. Fossil whale skulls are sometimes a jumble of broken bones that hardly make sense at the rock outcrop and require care and study back at a laboratory. Also, they almost always involve heavy logistics that simply outstripped our time, our resources, and, to be frank, my motivation.

      Caro’s suggestion reminded me of that whale skull we had seen together by the side of the road, although I was only burdened by the recollection to a point. If we had more time, maybe we could collect it, but we had to make hard decisions on the use of our time. We were in the Atacama to understand the evolution of the Humboldt Current ecosystem, as read from layers of fossils from dozens of species across time—doing so offered the chance to find out much more than a single broken-up baleen whale skull could ever tell us. Constructing a single stratigraphic column from the stacks of rocks across miles of fractured desert terrain was something reasonable and feasible to achieve during a single field season, if not particularly sexy. I was also on the hook to deliver publications out of our work, as a foundation for future collaborations. As it turned out, I had no clue how wrong I was about the importance of that broken-up skull at the side of the road, nor a hint about the scope of what it represented.

      If I was ambivalent about seeing Tuareg, at least I was buoyed by the thought of reuniting with Jim Parham. Jim is a like-minded scientist, a friend, and a terrific sounding board. His finely tuned bullshit detector always checked my field decisions about logistics. Earlier that day, we had split the field team in two to maximize our time: Caro and I took the students to the south, while Jim and Tuareg went north to Cerro Ballena. “I really don’t think we both should be in the same truck as Tuareg,” I said to Jim at breakfast. “Oh—just as a matter of sanity,” he assented.

      When Jim, Caro, and I had visited Cerro Ballena with Tuareg several years earlier, we’d referred to its location as “that road cut next to Playa Pulpos,” taken from the nearest highway sign. By late 2010, it had become Cerro Ballena—literally “whale hill” in Spanish—if only because of global geopolitics, in this dusty part of the Atacama. In the past few decades, Chile’s geologic resources have become prized targets for extraction by the mining industry, and accommodating large mining machines has meant road widening along remote parts of the Pan-American Highway. An environmental-impact study at Cerro Ballena concluded that further expansion would very likely uncover more fossils. Nevertheless, a road-construction company was green-lighted to begin widening the highway. To comply, the company enlisted Tuareg and his museum for assistance, with Chile’s strong natural patrimony laws ensuring that any fossils would be saved. It was then that Tuareg had started sending me clipped e-mails and shaky videos from the site, not exactly adequately conveying the message of what was happening there. Besides, it was Tuareg—hard to pull out the facts from hyperbole.

      When Caro and I arrived, Tuareg and Jim were pacing about the quarry. Large black felt tarps dotted the desert floor every dozen feet, stretching north and south. I ambled up to Jim. “Dude,” he said in a low voice, telling me everything I needed to know in a single word. “This is not the Playa Pulpos that we saw two years ago.” Everyone gathered to follow as Tuareg walked from tarp to tarp, rolling each one backward. My mouth fell open as I absorbed the fact that every tarp covered at least one complete whale skeleton, and sometimes several on top of one another. Every black tarp, dozens spread up and down the road-cut quarry, demarcated a whale skeleton. The sheer density of complete skeletons outstripped everything I thought that I knew about how whales get preserved as fossils.

      The skeletons, some thirty feet long, were almost all complete in a way that fossil whales hardly ever are, nose to tail. Many looked as if the creature had died in place, carefully turned on its back, and then been pressed flat over geologic time, like a preserved flower. Skulls were easy to spot, their triangular projections and bowed jawbones at the end of a trail of bricklike vertebrae. Rib cages collapsed toward tails, like gigantic Slinkys. In many skeletons, the ribs were still adorned with shoulder blades connected to arms and even finger bones. The fossil whales at this site were jaw-droppingly complete. And it made no sense that there were so many, so close together. I couldn’t think of any other field site of fossil whales like it.

      I was stunned. Tuareg gabbed away with a positively gleeful Caro and her students. I walked over to where Jim stood at the south end of the quarry, taking photos and rubbing sediment between his fingers. We silently watched the sun slipping over the horizon, evening cloud banks bringing a cool wind. In the distance, a single round peak—El Morro, a weathered mound of igneous rock—capped the view.

      “It’s over,” Jim said, flatly. I looked north and south across the entire quarry, more than a football field in length. I knew exactly what he meant: anything we had thought about doing needed to make room for this site and the several dozen skeletons that stretched up and down the hill in each direction. Measuring the stratigraphic columns across the Caldera Basin, slotting in all of the fossils we already knew about, deciphering that geologic map full of faults—it all needed to wait. My hours and hours of planning had focused on a sure thing, returning with bags of rock samples and with notebooks full of the makings of promised papers. Entire whale skeletons were not part of that plan, certainly not dozens of them.

      I breathed in, anxious and unsure. I was frustrated with myself for not listening to Tuareg more carefully earlier on, paralyzed by the enormity of the scene in front of me. At the same time, part of me recognized that the scope of the site, with its dozens of perfect whale skeletons, was undeniably significant—and I had an open invitation to be one of the first ones to study a place like nowhere else, as far as I knew, on the planet. It was vexing and tantalizing; it was a kind of Pandora’s box, and we’d just seen it crack open.

      “I know,” I said. “What are we going to do?”