University Park resident Nick Pyenson has spent his career trying to understand the past, present and future of the largest creatures that have ever lived.
That presents some problems, as Pyenson explains in his much-praised 2018 book, “Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures,” which is now out in paperback as recently noted in the New York Times.
For one thing, there’s the sheer size. One of his discoveries involved a tangle of blood vessels and nerves in between the lower jawbones of a species of whale — bones that are literally the size of telephone poles.
“Just measuring the length, width, height or circumference of the bones and skulls of rorqual whales, even the smaller ones, requires thick foam blocks, moving straps, and all the coordination you’d need to move furniture,” he writes.
It’s also not easy to get a whale carcass. Pyenson, who is a research geologist and curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, helps dig up fossils in the Chilean desert, works with Icelandic whalers, pores over old whaling records and spends time with giant whale bones stored at the Smithsonian’s warehouses in Prince George’s County.
While that makes research hard, it makes reading about the research more entertaining than your standard treatise, earning the praise from The New Yorker, Nature, Popular Science, and biologist Edward O. Wilson.
To hear a segment on NPR’s Fresh Air interviewing Pyenson on his book, click here.
The book is available to purchase online everywhere or you can pick up a copy at Politics and Prose at Union Market or Connecticut Ave.
