 Whales have captured our imagination for millennia and sometimes that fascination with them manifests in very strange ways. In the 1970s when NASA created the Voyager space missions to send spacecraft on a tour of the solar system and on its way outward, it affixed these golden disks to the side. And on these golden disks were messages meant to someone, something should that entity want to know who sent these spacecraft on their voyage. And what's really interesting is these records contain audio images and greetings in 55 human languages and one non-human language, which is humpback whale song. Now that should be really strange. That's a funny thing. It presumes a lot about what we think whales are saying. But the fact of the matter is we still don't know what whale song actually means. We don't know if that's really a greeting or if it's just a comment about what they ate for lunch. And that's a microcosm of this enigma, this mystery of wanting to know where they came from and where they're going. So when you think about whales you probably have this image in your head. This is a shot of humpback whale in Antarctica, Wilhelmina Bay. This is more typically what you imagine when you think of a whale. Living 99% of its life away from us underwater, they remain inaccessible. So the ways that we want to know about them require tools of investigation that get us there, that extend our senses. 30 seconds after this picture was taken, I took this one from the boat on top of the water where that whale then came to the surface to go look at the observers observing it. And so this is a bit of that connection that we have to this very enigmatic species where we want to know more about it, but we can't actually interrogate it directly. So this is why the questions that scientists ask are some of the best ones for understanding what these animals are all about. Because they're fantastic, because they're amazing, because their traits are so spectacular, Archreosity leads us to ask more and more questions about them. I'm a paleontologist and I work at the Smithsonian which houses the world's largest museum complex on the planet. Some 156 million objects, specimens. And museums are special institutions because they're kind of like the vaults of past worlds. If we want to know what the lost worlds of the past were like, whether it's in geologic history or human history, we need that evidence. And there's no better place to find that evidence to safeguard it, to study it, to take care of it for the future than museums. And so the evidence of the past that I encounter, the bones of long extinct whales, are right there before me. But I want to share a bit more about how we know about that and what that tells us about where they came from and where they're going. The first most amazing fact about whales is that they once lived on land. Some 50 million years ago, they had four legs. They had long, probably furry snouts, nostrils halfway down, not right above their eyes. And over the course of about 10 million years, relatively short period of time, they then start to look somewhat more like the whales that we recognize today, living underwater full time, having a tail fluke, probably doing something that looks pretty fearsome. And we have this image of this evolutionary transformation being somewhat one directional, like it's happening in a linear fashion. But actually, that's not really how evolution works. It's really convenient when we look at it from our perspective as one stage going to another in a long series of successes. But actually, the way Darwin articulated it here, as evolution is a bushy tree, is actually way more accurate. Evolution is a story of failures with very few successes. When I look at the fossil record, I'm mainly looking at the story of failures and the successes. That's where it gets really interesting, because that tells you how things are working today. And so instead of thinking about the evolution of whales as one sort of long succession leading to a successful dominance, this bushy tree of whales, if we went back 50 million years ago, the beach party would look something like this. And all these different forms went extinct, except for the one in the back that begat all the whales that we see today. The most likely unsuccessful one at the time was the one that became adapted to the water full time. So the fossil record tells us about past states that we wouldn't otherwise know. But the fossil record is actually very incomplete. All those artistic reconstructions that I showed you are just that. The actual evidence we can sometimes hold in our hands, bits of bone, shards of teeth, that is the direct evidence of the past. And from that we have to become good detectives, ask good questions. And sometimes we get lucky. And getting lucky is largely a matter of science in a social context. And geopolitics drives a lot of the expeditionary science that I do. This is a picture of fossil field work in the Atacama Desert of Chile a few years ago right along the side of the Pan-American highway. A road construction company expanding the highway to make way for mining equipment to go up and down the Pan-American highway to recover mineral resources that are used by developing countries exposed one, two, three, four and 40 other skeletons of fossil whales all right by the side of the road. And that's fairly unusual for someone like me who's used to dealing with fragmentary remains. So I had a bit of a logistical problem on my hand in terms of scale and time because the company still needed to continue with their work and we still had scientific questions about what's going on. And at the time we decided to do something innovative and we applied 3D scanning techniques to capture a digital facsimile of those records before us. The national patrimony of Chile never left the country. Indeed it still awaits fossil preparation and detailed work to remove the rock from bone. But using digital data we were able to capture context. This is the crime scene of wanting to know what happened here. And as it turns out we think that harmful algal blooms, poisons created by single-celled organisms some several million years ago, likely led to the die-off and the many fossil whale skeletons that we see before us today. But what's great about digital data is that you can then pull it back and it captures a moment in time the way you were in the field that you can then see in the laboratory. And in the safe context of the laboratory you have much more time to examine it in detail and if you have the right kinds of tools you can make a 3D print out of it. And so this is a 3D print of that same image. And it's amazing to me to be able to hold the direct evidence in miniature in my hands but these provide me with tools to communicate it. And so the objects that we have in museums only make sense if we're able to speak for them. One function of the museum is to provide us with scientific answers to create these objects and collections where we can or replicas and facsimiles but also to tell narratives, to tell us stories about how we know what we know about life in the past because we do want to know what's going to go on in the future. A blue whale like this is a very large organism. It's actually larger than any dinosaur that ever lived. 100 feet long, maybe 200 tons in weight. And the amazing fact, the second amazing fact, is that blue whales are the largest whales ever to have lived. So we are literally living in an age of giants. But nearly not so much because in the early 20th century we nearly hunted blue whales to extinction. 99% of the blue whales that were on the planet at the start of the 20th century were gone by the 1960s. They barely escaped extinction from widespread pelagic whaling. And whaling is in the news today because especially in the Asian Pacific region, many countries are either involved in commercial whaling or not and it's becoming a big issue that gets a lot of news media coverage. But I actually think this is a little bit of a red herring because the real issue is not about whaling which only amounts for a small portion of the total whales killed every year. A thousand times more whales are killed each year by ship strike, net entanglement, by-catch. Those are the real issues that are threatening whales today. Not so much whaling which is much more artisanal in scale. While whaling did not render any single species extinct in the 21st century, some whales species did go extinct and here's one example. This is a photo of the Yangtze River Dolphin taken in 1918 by the hunter who first collected the specimen that is now actually at the Smithsonian in our collections. The bones and the rest of the skeleton that belong to this individual represent in large part the totality of what we know for the species. Why? Because it is completely extinct. Large-scale urbanization of the Yangtze River rendered that habitat unusable to this species. And this is a photo of the last individual from 2002. Since that time when this individual died, no more Yangtze River Dolphins have ever been heard or spotted. So this is a tale of extinction in our times. Now, the situation for the Vakita, a small porpoise that lives in the Gulf of California, gives us some reason for hope. There are maybe 12 individuals of this porpoise left on the planet. And they are largely a victim of by-catch from a fishery that is dedicated towards going after a single fish, the Totoaba, whose bladder fetches tens of thousands of dollars on Asian markets. And so it's not directly because we're killing this individual species, but it's by-catch. It's an indirect victim of another industry. And with 12 individuals you're left with not very many options for saving the species. But there are some efforts, and this includes one two years ago, to create ex situ conservation, capture the remaining individuals, put them in sea pens until we can stabilize the external threats to that lineage. This effort didn't go so well and it had to be stopped because one of these individuals actually died out of the capture attempt. But a year later, a calf and a mother were later photographed in the same area. So they're not extinct quite yet. It's a testament to how hard it is to know about extinction in the seas and also the resiliency of many of these lineages, despite human interaction. So what's life like for a whale in the oceans today? They live at the peril and promise of civilization. If you're a large whale, entanglement and fishing lines like this North Atlantic right whale is a major threat along with being struck by a ship, either a cargo ship or cruise ship. And if you're lucky, you might get freed from this entanglement by some curious humans who have the ability to free you from those ropes. This would be a success story many times it's not. And there's reports back from the east coast of the United States of many of these right whales that are showing up dead already this season. So it's still a cause for concern, especially because this species made it through whaling, but it hasn't recovered. So even with the cessation of widespread hunting, there's still serious threats to whales on this planet. Now, why is this interesting for us? I want to make the case that whales tell us a lot about ourselves. Some whales live human lifetimes. They live actually longer than us. This species of whale, the bowhead in the Arctic, may live up to 200 years. So imagine the stories a 200-year-old whale would tell us about our own civilization. A 200-year-old whale alive today would tell us about the rise and fall of many industries, about technological innovations and changes in the ocean. Not to say anything about the rise of pollutants, plastics, you name it, a whale that old has seen it. Now turn that around and imagine a bowhead whale born today. What kind of future Arctic will it see? An Arctic full of cargo ships, cruise ships, pollution. We have a lot of stake in that and we have a role to play in that future as well. So when I think about the future of whales, I think that those that are most likely to survive and thrive on planet Earth in the age of humans are going to be the adaptive flexible ones. The ones that have broad geographic ranges, flexible diets, a bit like this humpback whale in Antarctica. In this picture may look very pristine and beautiful, but we know that even in Antarctica, it is not a pristine environment. Our footprint, our impact on ecosystems on this planet is broad. It's going to be persistent. And so they're very much living on our planet. And so we have a big role to play in the future that we share with whales. But I am excited and that's because we are living in the golden age of whale science. This is a photo taken from a drone right above one of those same humpback whales feeding in this incredibly complex behavior called bubble netting, creating a corral around a school of fish that allows it to eat fish basically in a barrel. And we would not otherwise know about this unique behavior if we didn't have this technology. So technological innovations for scientists are giving us tremendous insight into a largely inaccessible world. And think about this last, you know, this goes back to our original slide of the disks. What can we know about whales moving forward from all these different pieces of knowledge that we have today? We are inherently curious species and we want to know more about these enigmas. And it's really, you know, the question of what whale song means is likely a question that scientists can answer in large part because of the tools that they have. So I don't know if we're ever going to know what whales are saying, but certainly scientists are still listening. Thanks.