A young Leonardo da Vinci saw a fossil whale embedded in an Italian hillside 鈥� centuries before what is currently regarded as the first description of such a fossil. The experience may have given the Renaissance-era genius an intuitive appreciation of the vast age of Earth, long before geologists realised the planet鈥檚 antiquity.
Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452 in what is now Italy, wrote about many scientific subjects, centuries before the rise of organised research. The claim that he saw a fossil whale rests on passages in the , a collection of scraps of his writings. On one page, he wrote of an unnamed animal with 鈥渂ranching, sturdy dorsal fins鈥� that he imagined 鈥渢empestuously tearing open the briny waves鈥�, causing 鈥渢errified shoals of dolphins and big tuna fish鈥� to 鈥渇lee鈥�.
For many years, scholars thought this was metaphorical, perhaps a rewriting of a passage from the Roman poet Ovid鈥檚 Metamorphoses. But in 2014, Kay Etheridge at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania argued that it might be a description of something da Vinci actually saw. Italy has many whale fossils, especially in the hills of Tuscany where he spent his early years, so .
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A new study by Alberto Collareta at the University of Pisa in Italy and his colleagues largely backs Etheridge up, but they question one aspect of her interpretation.
鈥淓theridge put the location of this encounter between Leonardo and a fossil whale in a cave,鈥� says Collareta. This was because, on the neighbouring page of the Codex, da Vinci wrote: 鈥淗aving wandered for some distance among overhanging rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern鈥�. However, Collareta鈥檚 team says Italian fossil whales aren鈥檛 normally found in caves and the pages of the Codex aren鈥檛 in any particular order, so the two passages are probably unrelated.
The first recognised cetacean fossil was a dolphin, described by Italian painter and palaeontologist Agostino Scilla in his 1670 book (鈥淰ain Speculation Undeceived by Sense鈥�).
The whale incident may have led da Vinci to think about the age of Earth and to realise that the planet was more than a few thousand years old.
After his description of the whale, an animal that wasn鈥檛 recognised as a mammal at the time, he added: 鈥淥 time, swift despoiler of created things, how many kings, how many peoples have you undone, and how many changes of states and of circumstances have followed since the wondrous form of this fish died here?鈥� On the reverse of the page, he described 鈥渢wo lines of shells鈥� in the ground, which probably refers to rock layers or strata containing fossil shells. Da Vinci argued that they represented separate depositions.
鈥淎t the very same time he describes what we think is a fossil whale, he was reasoning in these terms of deep and very long geological time, which overwhelms the human timespan and also possibly the timespan of civilisations,鈥� says Collareta.
The study of geology, which began in earnest in the 1600s, would ultimately discover the age of Earth.
Historical Biology
