In 2007, Inupiat hunters in Alaska made an astonishing discovery — a bowhead whale carrying a piece of living history within its flesh. Embedded deep in the whale’s neck blubber was a 19th-century harpoon fragment, a bomb lance manufactured in New Bedford, Massachusetts, around the 1880s — the height of America’s whaling era. The finding stunned scientists. The whale had clearly survived the attack more than a century earlier, meaning it was likely over 100 years old, possibly closer to 150 or e