ANCIENT RELATIVES OF LIVING WHALES 



By REMINGTON KELLOGG 



Assista>it Curator, Division of Mammals, U. S. National Museum 



Nearly one hundred years have elapsed since the attention of the 

 readers of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society was 

 directed to the finding of an extinct relative of living whales in a 

 marl bank within the present boundaries of the State of Louisiana. 

 In the ensuing years numerous dissertations have been written in 

 regard to this animal and yet many details of its bodily construction 

 remained unknown. Notwithstanding the rather wide distribution of 

 deposits in which such fossil remains occur, there still exists a sur- 

 prising scarcity of material suitable for critical study of the peculiari- 

 ties of this animal. In connection with a general interpretation of the 

 geological history of the cetaceans, an effort has been made to augment 

 available evidence by further field work in areas that gave some prom- 

 ise of increasing our knowledge of these animals. Accordingly plans 

 were made for a visit to one of these fossil bearing deposits and 

 on October 2, 1929, the writer and Mr. Norman H. Boss left Wash- 

 ington for Alabama under the joint auspices of the Carnegie Institu- 

 tion of Washington and the Smithsonian Institution. 



The Jackson formation of the Gulf Coastal Plain, which consists of 

 calcareous fossiliferous sands and clays of marine origin, outcrops in 

 eastern Texas in the region between Trinity and Sabine Rivers, and 

 also extends eastward across central Louisiana, Mississippi, and Ala- 

 bama. This formation extends up the Mississippi embayment to near 

 Forrest City in St. Francis County, Arkansas. In northern Louisiana 

 the Jackson formation is concealed over a large area by swamp de- 

 posits, but crops out in southern Caldwell Parish. It was in this 

 parish that Judge H. Bree in 1832 found a partial skeleton of an at 

 that time unknown colossal animal. Some 28 vertebrae were exposed 

 by the slump of a hill near the Ouachita River after long continued 

 rains. One of these vertebrae was sent to Dr. Richard Harlan at 

 Philadelphia who hastened to publish an account of the discovery. On 

 account of its supposed reptilian affinities, Harlan proposed to call this 

 animal the king of lizards, Basilosaurus. The supposed affinities of 

 Basilosaurus immediately aroused a world wide controversy. It was 

 not until January, 1839, when Dr. Harlan arrived in London, England, 

 with additional fossil remains which had been found on the plantation 



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