Cathedral of bones: Inside the world’s largest, deepest, and oldest whale graveyard (opens in new tab)

Life on Earth is older, stranger, and more grimly beautiful than we have time to consider most days. So take a moment to marvel over the recently discovered dark wonder that is the world’s oldest, deepest, and largest whale graveyard — a necropolis so vast it sounds less than a scientific find than the premise of a lost Jules Verne novel. A vast gash off the coast of Australia How old? The fossilized skull of a Pterocetus benguelae, an extinct species of beaked whale, has been dated to 5.26 m...