Just another dead whale

From the WSJ's Morning Report:

A 49-foot, 50-ton bowhead killed last month off the Alaskan coast was apparently a contemporary of Herman Melville, at least according to the marine biologists who studied the fragment of a lance found in the whale's neck. The arrow-shaped projectile was probably shot at the whale in 1890 -- a year before the author of "Moby Dick" passed away -- and was most likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, tells the Associated Press. Mr. Bockstoce and his colleagues estimate the male whale was 115 years to 130 years old, meaning he could have been born as early as 1877, at a time when federal Reconstruction troops were still withdrawing from the South and when Thomas Edison has just invented the phonograph, the AP points out. Whale experts believe some of the giant mammals can live 200 years, though behemoths in the century club are hard to find. This one was mortally wounded with by modern-day version of the humanly produced projectile that first lodged in his blubber so long ago.

Source: USAToday.