From Fathoms: The World in the Whale, which was published in July by Simon and Schuster.

Many international collecting institutions aim to feature a blue whale among their centerpieces. Suspended from the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History is a ninety-four-foot replica of a female blue, found dead off the coast of South America in 1923, made of polyurethane, a fiberglass coating, and six hundred pounds of paint. A heart, salvaged from a blue whale killed in a heavy sea-ice season near Newfoundland in 2014, was sent by the Royal Ontario Museum to Germany to be…