The Basilosaurus
The most extraordinary Cetacean relic was an almost complete skeleton discovered in 1842 on Judge Creagh’s Alabama plantation. Enslaved people believed the bones belonged to a fallen angel, while local doctors initially classified it as a huge reptile and named it Basilosaurus. When specimens reached English anatomist Owen, he determined it was actually a whale of a departed species, renaming it Zeuglodon. This case illustrated that whale skeletons provide little clue to the shape of the living body. Owen pronounced the Zeuglodon one of the most extraordinary creatures ever obliterated from existence by the world’s changes, confirming the whale’s extraordinary evolutionary history.
Of Antiquity
Standing among mighty Leviathan skeletons, the narrator experiences overwhelming temporal displacement, feeling borne back to “that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man.” He describes visions of Saturn’s grey chaos and Polar eternities when ice pressed upon what are now the Tropics and no inhabitable land existed. The entire world belonged to the whale, whose wake lines the present locations of the Andes and Himalayas. The narrator dramatically declares that Ahab’s harpoon shed older blood than the Pharaoh’s, that Methuselah seems a school-boy, and the whale’s existence before all time means it must exist after all human ages end.
Of Egyptian Attestations
Beyond geological traces in limestone and marl, Leviathan’s antiquity appears on Egyptian monuments. About fifty years before the narrative, a sculpted and painted planisphere was discovered on the granite ceiling of the great temple of Denderah. This celestial map abounded with centaurs, griffins, and dolphins resembling modern astronomical figures, but among them swam the old Leviathan—swimming in that planisphere “centuries before Solomon was cradled.” The Egyptian attestations provide cultural and historical confirmation of the whale’s immemorial presence in human consciousness.
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