Human Footprint

*Music Playing * Welcome to the land of giants here.

Wow.

See hell to the yeah.

This is crazy.

How many whales do you have here?

We have every species that's on the planet is represented in our collection.

Nick Pyenson is a biologist who studies ancient whales.

So he spends a lot of time with fossils that are tens of millions of years old.

But he's no stranger to living whales either.

If there's a question about whale diversity and evolution, you can probably find an answer with one of these specimens.

This is Nick's happy place, a Smithsonian storage facility in Maryland he calls, the whale Warehouse.

And I know every collection has its unique smell, but what the hell is it that I'm smelling right now?

You're smelling whale oil just everywhere, and it's whale oil thats hundreds of years old that still hasn't really leached out of the bones.

Seeping out of the bones now.

Yeah.

Let me have you take a deep whiff of this one over.

Okay.

You just get way up in there.

Well its you know, it's biology.

You got to get.

All up in the business, all right.

Yeah, oh gosh.

Yeah.

So, you know, that's, you know, I have my own way of describing that feels like knowledge to me, but maybe to you, it's just, you know, death warmed over.

It does not smell like knowledge to me.

I'm sure there's a ton of knowledge here.

But its funky.

It's, it's funky.

I'm not going to lie to you.

Now I've seen a lot of biological specimens in a lot of museum collections, but nothing like this.

So here are the jawbones.

What the hell.

These are the jawbones of a blue whale.

This is ridiculous.

Inside are the jawbone of a bull sperm whale that was 60 feet long.

The owner of the blue whale jawbones, was 92 feet long.

Woah.

And here's the crazy thing.

You are looking at the largest single bone in the history of life.

There is no dinosaur bone, mammoth task.

Nothing is as big as this bone.

Wow.

So this is it.

And we'll never collect something like this again.

These are blue whales from the Southern Ocean.

And this was collected at a time when there was still a lot of whaling going on.

Yeah, especially in that part of the world where some 2 to 3 million whales were killed.

This was one of them.

Even the biggest animals that ever lived aren't off limits for the planet's top predator.

But why?

I mean, there's got to be an easier way to eat.