“If your nostrils were positioned like those of a dolphin, you’d blow your nose from the top of your forehead,” Nick Pyenson writes. In Spying on Whales, the Smithsonian curator sketches out the story of seagoing mammals, the branch of terrestrial life that returned to the sea millions of years ago instead of staying put on land. The great sea creatures retain vestiges of their legs and feet and DNA studies show their relation to hippos, cows and deer. Pyenson writes with great enthusiasm for these “fascinating and enigmatic” creatures, “almost a human dream of alien life: approachable, sophisticated, and inscrutable.”
