A young Leonardo da Vinci saw a fossil whale embedded in an Italian hillside – 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’s 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 “branching, sturdy dorsal fins” that he imagined “tempestuously tearing open the briny waves”, causing “terrified shoals of dolphins and big tuna fish” to “flee”.
For many years, scholars thought this was metaphorical, perhaps a rewriting of a passage from the Roman poet Ovid’s 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.
“Etheridge put the location of this encounter between Leonardo and a fossil whale in a cave,” says Collareta. This was because, on the neighbouring page of the Codex, da Vinci wrote: “Having wandered for some distance among overhanging rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern”. However, Collareta’s team says Italian fossil whales aren’t normally found in caves and the pages of the Codex aren’t 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 (“Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense”).
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’t recognised as a mammal at the time, he added: “O 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?” On the reverse of the page, he described “two lines of shells” in the ground, which probably refers to rock layers or strata containing fossil shells. Da Vinci argued that they represented separate depositions.
“At 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,” says Collareta.
The study of geology, which began in earnest in the 1600s, would ultimately discover the age of Earth.
Historical Biology
