A sperm whale tooth from Alexander Kielland

The University Museum of Bergen is famous for its whale skeletons. Some of them can be seen in the exhibition in The Whale Hall, while approximately 200 can be found in the museum’s collections. One of the objects in the collection is a sperm whale tooth (museum number BM. 330). It is whitish-yellow in colour and is about the size of a human hand. The tooth is labelled with a piece of paper, perhaps writing paper, on which Stavanger Avis and the year 1889 is written. One can also read that the tooth comes from Orre in Jæren. The museum’s records state that the sender was an A. L. Kielland in 1889. Since the author Alexander Lange Kielland (1849-1906) was editor of the Stavanger Avis newspaper at that time, we can assume that the tooth came from him. No cover letter has yet been obtained, so we do not know if he himself found the tooth or if he received it from someone else.

In the latter half of the 1800s, Bergen Museum (today the University Museum of Bergen) was in the process of accumulating its scientific collections, and needed objects such as skeletons, skins and other parts of living organisms. The museum obtained these objects either by purchasing them, receiving them in exchange for other objects, collecting them in nature, or as gifts. We can assume that the sperm whale tooth from Kielland was in the latter category because this is the case for other similar objects. When the museum chose to purchase or exchange objects, these were usually larger, rarer and more spectacular animals. For example, a few years earlier, the museum exchanged the skeletons of one minke whale and one dolphin for 15 skeletons from the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, including a bull yak, three antelopes, two penguins, an emu and two snakes. However, the sperm whale tooth BM. 330 came from the Norwegian Sea.

Nothing is so boundless as the sea. These are the first words of Alexander Kielland’s book Garmann and Worse (1880), considered a Norwegian classic. Over two-thirds of our planet is covered by oceans. The human body is adapted to life on land, but biological literature debates whether humans should be called a secondary aquatic animal in the same way as whales and seals. The reason for this is our intense exploitation of marine resources, and the crucial role fish and other seafood play in our survival. The sperm whale has been an important resource because the large accumulation of fat in its head was used for lighting, cosmetics, processing leather and in pharmaceutical products. Like many other large animals in the ocean, it is also an important part of many stories, and shrouded in a certain mystery. The sperm whale is not only immortalised through museum collections, but also through one of the world’s most famous novels, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851, Norwegian translation 1948).

The sperm whale is a toothed whale like dolphins and killer whales, but is something special, partly because it can grow to a massive 18 meters in length. Right at the front of its head, above its jaw, is the enormous accumulation of fat that it uses to communicate with other sperm whales and for echolocation. Like other toothed whales, the sperm whale emits high-frequency sounds that are reflected back when it hits something in the water, allowing the whales to sense things without actually seeing them. This helps the sperm whale find and attack its prey, which it can catch by grasping it with its teeth.

We can imagine the history of the tooth from the time it started growing in the lower jaw of a sperm whale, and was used to catch food and show off in front of fellow species. One day, however, life ended. Most dead whales eventually sink down and form islands on the seabed with distinctive ecosystems based on the nutrients from their bodies. The decomposition of muscles, skin and inner organs occurs relatively quickly, whereas the last things recycled are the hardest parts of the body: bones and teeth. However, something else happened to this particular tooth. Perhaps the whole body or parts of it were carried by an ocean current towards the Norwegian coast.

Animal teeth are among the marine objects that are occasionally washed ashore and discovered by humans. Among these was Alexander Kielland. In 1889, or perhaps a few years earlier, he or someone he knew, found this sperm whale tooth at Orre in Jæren, a place where Kielland regularly visited on holiday. Many people pick up objects they find in nature, look at them and consider whether they are worth taking home. Other times, there are economic, cultural or research-based reasons behind collecting. However, one thing that all objects from nature have in common is that they can only become part of our common knowledge and memory if they are shared. Kielland chose to share the sperm whale tooth, and it is currently part of the osteological collection at the University Museum of Bergen together with the remains of seven other sperm whales. Some of them, like this one, are just a single body part, while others are made up of larger parts of the body.

The tooth is 13 centimetres long and is labelled with a piece of paper on which Stavanger Avis is written. Perhaps this paper was the original packaging or label when the tooth was sent. We will not know why Kielland chose to send this tooth to the museum until a cover letter is found. So far, there is also no indication that the tooth has been involved in research, but this is made possible because it is part of a museum collection. Among other things, teeth can be used to determine the age of sperm whales, but in order to count the number of growth rings, the tooth must be etched with acid or cut open. What we do know is that the tooth has been subject to careful collection management. In 2010, it was frozen to minus 30 degrees Celsius in connection with a relocation of the collections, and in 2012 it was checked for insect infestation.

Kielland was enthralled by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (Origin of species, 1859), and we know that he wrote letters to Darwin. The theory of evolution tells us that life on Earth is constantly changing. Whales are mammals, and they had ancestors that lived on land. In Kielland’s time, the evolutionary history of whales was still a bit of a mystery, especially in terms of which mammals are their closest mammal relatives. This did not become clear until the 1990s, when extinct, fossilised whales were found with an ankle showing that whales belong among the even-toed ungulates along with other mammals such as pigs and giraffes.

Kielland probably did not read Moby Dick, which became a classic and was translated into Norwegian only several decades later. However, perhaps he saw the characteristic spray from the blowhole of a sperm whale out at sea. In any case, he had seen enough of the ocean to understand that it was important, and that the milky white, palm-sized whale tooth that had emerged from the deep should be collected and shared. 

Acknowledgement 

Many thanks to Hanneke Meijer, Terje Lislevand, Anne Karin Hufthammer and Johnny Magnussen for access to and information about the collections at the University Museum in Bergen, as well as to Tore Rem for information about Alexander Kielland.