Natural History Wanderings

The New York Times reports

A study of hundreds of specimens from European archaeological digs found two species of whales that are no longer present in the continent’s waters.

Industrial-scale whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries nearly drove many whale species into extinction. Populations of some of the large marine mammals are just starting to recover after the kind of predation described in the novel “Moby-Dick,” while others face ongoing peril to their existence. But it turns out that whaling’s effects on where whales live go back much deeper into human history.

Read more at Some Whales May Have Been Wiped Out by Medieval Europeans