The whale didn’t make it back out to sea. Earlier this week a young grey whale perished in Washington’s Willipa River, one in an unexpected and tragic series of cetacean deaths among the state’s waterways. It’s impossible to remove the whale. The beast will decay there, a “marine mammal” whose bones may be buried in silt and sediment carried by freshwater.

A million, ten million, or a hundred million years from now, I wonder what someone might think of the whale’s bones. How would they recognize it? Would the whale’s bones just be strange remains? Or would it be shocking, the skeleton of a seagoing animal perhaps surrounded by fossils of leaves, trees, bony fish, deer, and raccoon remains? I wonder because paleontologists recently asked very similar questions about a tooth that appeared where no one was expecting it.