19th-century harpoon gives clue on whales

Biologists, long stumped at figuring out how old whales are, lucked out when a 50-ton bowhead caught off Alaska came with a telltale clue: fragments of a harpoon lodged in a shoulder bone.

The weapon was used more than a century ago by whalers from New Bedford, Massachusetts, enabling researchers to estimate that the whale was at least 115 years old and providing more evidence for their long-held belief that the bowhead whale is one of the longest-living mammals on earth, surviving for up to 200 years.

"It's pretty rare that you get the chance to date the age of a whale," said John Bockstoce, the whaling historian at the New Bedford Whaling Museum who analyzed the fragments.

"We're all finding it very interesting," he said Tuesday.

A biologist in Alaska spotted the pieces of the projectile as they were being pulled from the whale's blubber by Eskimos who had killed the animal last month.

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He sent them to Bockstoce, who identified them as parts of an exploding lance made in New Bedford in the late 1800s, when the city was the world's whaling capital. Hunters would spear the animal with the weapon, which would detonate once inside.