When will the slaughter end?

Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, is quick to tell us he’s not a ‘whale hugger’. ‘I didn’t fall asleep snuggling stuffed whales or decorate my room with posters of humpbacks suspended in prismatic light.’ Pyenson sees whales through their ancestral bones, and their contemporary entrails, digging up their past or scrying their future. Spying on Whales begins its surveillance in the fossil-rich site of Cerro Ballena (‘Whale Hill’) in the Atacama desert. Here, in the Miocene layers, he uncovers an entire pod of ancient, stranded whales, stilled in the moment of their deep-time death. It’s an Indiana Jones moment. He may disavow cetacean sentimentality in favour of scientific rigour, but Pyenson can’t resist enlivening his exploits with a boyish excitement.

And it is an exciting world, this one of prehistoric whales: 600 extinct species —compared to the current 85 extant ones — which include the wondrous ‘walrus whale’, a mash-up of the Arctic tuskers with dolphin-like bodies; and the ferocious ‘killer sperm whale’, arrayed with canines in both upper and lower jaws.