Whale on the nose.

Slightly off topic, but worth an airing. A five million year old fossil whale skeleton has been found in a vineyard in Tuscany, Italy. Now that was a phrase that didn't feature in my Linguaphone Italian course: 'Excuse me sir, there is a whale in my vineyard'.

Of course there is a Darwin link: in The Origin of Species Darwin wrote: In North American the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with a widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist on the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.

This became something of a gift for quote-mining opponents of evolution (where are the intermediate fossil forms?), but a stirring defence came from the late Stephen Jay Gould in Hooking Leviathan by its past (from his book Dinosaur in a Haystack), an essay which traces the fossil lineage of whales. It's a wonderful story of palaeontology across years and continents and at the end Gould declares the case for the quadruped ancestry of whales 'open and shut' and the verdict 'sustained in spades, wine and roses'. So, find a bottle of Tuscan red, pop the cork and while savouring the bouquet wonder if there's a little fossil whale on the nose. The vineyard was at Castello Banfi, check out their website here, but be prepared for a pic of an Italian hilltop castle that will make you gnash your teeth and possibly rend your garments with envy at the beauty of it all. The vineyard's press release about the whale is here.