Did Leonardo da Vinci Find a Fossil Whale?

Image Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Around 1480, while still a young man living in Tuscany, Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the remains of an enormous creature. He described it as a once-living “marine monster” whose flesh had disappeared, leaving only bare bones buried beneath the land.

For centuries, the passage was difficult to interpret. Was Leonardo describing something he had actually seen, or simply imagining a monstrous creature from the sea?

Recent scholarship suggests the answer may be surprisingly straightforward. Leonardo appears to have encountered the fossilized remains of a whale.

In the Codex Arundel, Leonardo describes the animal as “once living” and later refers to its bones as “defleshed, stripped and bare.” According to paleontologists Alberto Collareta, Marco Collareta, Annalisa Berta, and Giovanni Bianucci, this wording strongly suggests that Leonardo was observing actual fossil remains rather than inventing a mythical creature (Collareta et al., 2020).

So how could whale bones end up in the hills of Tuscany?

The landscape Leonardo knew was very different from the environment that had existed there millions of years earlier. Much of Tuscany contains Pliocene marine sediments filled with shells and the fossil remains of sea animals. Fossil whales have been discovered at numerous locations near Vinci, including Empoli, Montopoli, Castelfiorentino, and Montaione. Some of these sites are only a few miles from Leonardo’s birthplace (Collareta et al., 2020).

Leonardo seems to have understood that the animal he was describing had once lived in the sea. More importantly, he recognized that an enormous amount of time must have passed between its life in the ocean and the discovery of its bones on dry land.

He wrote about the destructive power of time and wondered how many kings, peoples, and political changes had come and gone since the creature had died. The observation is remarkable because Leonardo was considering the idea of geological change centuries before modern geology developed as a formal science.

Other notes from the same period strengthen the connection. On the reverse side of the same folio, Leonardo discussed layers of fossil shells and questioned whether a single flood could explain their presence. He later returned to the image of a massive sea animal in the Codex Atlanticus, describing it moving through the ocean with a dark back “like a mountain” (Collareta et al., 2020).

The researchers argue that Leonardo most likely encountered the fossil along a Tuscan hillside rather than inside a cave, as some earlier interpretations suggested. Fossil whale remains in this region are commonly exposed in hillsides, fields, quarries, and eroded slopes.

If their interpretation is correct, Leonardo’s description may be the earliest known written account of a fossil whale. Long before paleontology became a science, Leonardo was already asking a familiar question: how did the remains of a sea creature end up buried beneath dry land?

Further Reading

Collareta, A., Collareta, M., Berta, A., & Bianucci, G. (2020). On Leonardo and a fossil whale: A reappraisal with implications for the early history of palaeontology. Historical Biology. https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2020.1787403