Dolphins

Or that would have been that, except word of the catch reached the ears of Colonel George Montagu, who lived in patrician seclusion on his estate some ten miles down the road. Montagu, veteran of the American Revolution (and at the time the world’s leading expert on the taxonomy of British sponges), was a corresponding member of several societies for natural history, and he set out to recover what was left of the carcass, which had been briefly exhibited at the county fair before being boiled down for oil—the bones unceremoniously dumped back in the river. A little diligent muckraking revealed the skeleton of what Montagu eventually decided was a little whale not previously seen on the English coast, so he wrote up a detailed anatomy and preserved its toothy skull.

Though Montagu stepped on a rusty nail a few months later and promptly died of tetanus, his final dissection outlived him: published posthumously, his account represents the first recognized scientific description of the bottlenose dolphin, a creature Americans generally think of as “Flipper,” but which those in the know call Tursiops truncatus. The skull of the Dart River Beast remains to this day in a drawer in London’s Natural History Museum—the eternal type specimen for the species as a whole. If, therefore, you wish to grasp the essential nature of the bottlenose, you should, technically speaking, start here, pulling item number GERM.353a, and looking down that bony beak into a pair of empty orbits. Alas, poor Yorick!

Actually, though, knowing the bottlenose is a good deal harder than that. Neither Colonel Montagu nor those rough-handed boatmen could have had any idea that the creature they dispatched to scientific apotheosis in 1814 would go on to lead such a queer and dramatic life in the collective imagination of modernity. Tursiops truncatus—a slate-gray, slick-skinned net thief, which coastal fishermen of the late nineteenth-century Atlantic sometimes called the “herring hog” in disgust—would, by the 1970s, leap in the vanguard of the Age of Aquarius, enjoying an improbable secular canonization as the superintelligent, ultrapeaceful, erotically uninhibited totem of the counterculture. And to this day, for many, the bottlenose—mainstay of aquatic ecotourism, beloved water-park performer, smiling incarnation of soulful holism—represents a cetacean version of our better selves. If, as Thoreau wrote a few years after the slaying of the Dart River dolphin, “animals . . . are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry a portion of our thoughts,” then there are few creatures that have done more hauling for Homo sapiens in the twentieth century than Tursiops truncatus.

A Mind in the Water