On Leonardo and a fossil whale: a reappraisal with implications for the early history of palaeontology

ABSTRACT

A recent reappraisal of two passages in Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel, in which the then young Leonardo reports on visiting a cave and on some sort of ʽmarine monster’, has led to the proposition that Leonardo observed and wrote on fossil remains of a whale preserved in a cave. Whereas this hypothesis appears reasonable overall, some problems persist in accepting the purported location in which Leonardo would have observed the fossil. Here we provide a new analysis of the aforementioned passages by Leonardo which allows us to confirm that Leonardo saw a fossil whale and recognised it as such. However, his observation did not occur in a cave, but likely along the flank of a hill, as relatively common for Tuscan Pliocene fossil cetaceans. Leonardo seemingly made taphonomic observations on the fossil whale and inferred that a considerable amount of time must have passed from the death of the whale in the sea to allow for its eventual discovery on land – an observation that likely contributed to shaping Leonardo’s later thoughts on sedimentation and fossilisation. This might represent Leonardo’s earliest text devoted to a palaeontological theme. Moreover, it comprises the first known description of a cetacean fossil.

KEYWORDS:

• Cetacea
• history of geosciences
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Pliocene
• taphonomy
• Tuscany

Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without online availability of high-quality scanned versions of the Codex Arundel, Codex Atlanticus and other writings by Leonardo via the British Library website (freely accessible at https://www.bl.uk/) and the interactive digital archive e-Leo (https://www.leonardodigitale.com/), the persons and institutions behind which we warmly thank. Many thanks are also due to Simone Casati (Gruppo AVIS Mineralogia e Paleontologia Scandicci), for sharing with us his photographs and memories of the Castelfiorentino fossil whale depicted in Figure 5(d), and to Gianpiero Rosati (Scuola Normale Superiore), for his expert advice on a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. We are sincerely grateful to Kay Etheridge (Gettysburg College) for pointing out this important episode of the early history of palaeontology, as well as for acting as the catalyst for the present study. Last but not least, constructive criticisms by Olivier Lambert, Marco Romano, Cheng-Hsiu Tsai, an anonymous reviewer and the journal editor Gareth Dyke greatly contributed to shaping the present paper in its final form – thank you very much!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.