Alright are we ready?
So.
Don’t strum it like that though.
I won’t strum it.
Just kidding, just kidding.
Hey guys I’m Maddie Sofia from NPR and Joe’s Big Idea.
We’re here at the Smithsonian’s Museum
Support Center and we’re about to check out
the largest collection of whale bones ever.
You can think of me as a marine mammal detective
through geologic time.
I look to the past to track down whale bones to understand how whales came to be and where they're going.
This is what I generally just call a whale
warehouse.
This is a place where we keep whale specimens,
fossil from extinct species and modern ones
from species that are alive today.
And they’re all under one roof.
And that makes it a unique kind of place.
Why whales?
So why whales?
I uh, I’m not a whale hugger.
Your socks would say otherwise.
Yea.
I got interested in whales because I thought
they were fantastic vehicles to understand
evolution.
I think that’s the job of any paleontologist
is trying to understand what happened in the
history of life that we didn’t see?
We want to know those things and it’s a
big detective story how do we figure it out.
What do we got?
Oof. 15.7.
So um.
Big head, bigger brain.
This happens to be the largest single specimen of a blue whale jawbone that is in any museum, period.
Wow.
And consequently because dinosaurs did not have a single bone that was larger than this one,
these are the largest single osteological
elements of any organism in the history of
life on earth.
That’s amazing does that get, does that
ever get lost on you?
No it actually you know, it kind of challenges
me to think of the right scientific question
to ask of this material.
Because you could think about, well how does a blue whale actually grow a bone this large?
What are the physics involved with feeding
with jaws this large?
Those are all questions that can be investigated
using these museum collections.
We have, across all these shelves, the skulls
of fossil whales.
And I’m going to lift off the jacket just
like this.
I think it’s tremendously cute.
Wow it’s crazy to think about how old these
things are.
Yea, right?
And you can actually touch them, right?
This is…wait I can touch them?
Yea go for it.
Well you strummed a cast so you might as well
graduate to this level.
That’s awesome.
There’s your time travel for the day.
That’s like 11 million years old!
I’m going to touch it again.
Sure, go for it.
That’s going to cost you.
So again this like imaginative process of
looking into the earth into past snapshots,
those give us clues about the potential future
states of where we’re heading.
And I also think that that’s something that
we still control.
We don’t know how the future’s going to
shake out, we do know that these systems are
dynamic and complex and can respond abruptly,
they can respond in ways that we can’t foresee.
But we are a part of it.
I think of humans as being participants in
this great experiment that we’re undertaking,
we just need to be more aware of that.
This is Madeline Sofia reporting from the
mouth of a whale.
Nick Pyenson also here.
It’s my day job so it’s not that big of
a deal to me.
Everyday situation for him.
