ABSTRACT
IN Bk IX, Ch. 3, Pliny declares: ‘The admirals of the fleets of Alexander the Great reported that the Gedrosi, who live by the River Arabis, fashion their house-doors from the jawbones of these monsters, and make their roof-beams out of their bones, of which many have been found sixty feet long.’ 1 There are also people who use the whale’s backbone, that is, the hollowed vertebrae, as mortars for pounding spices. 2 Also Volaterranus in Bk XXV tells how, in the year of Our Lord 1498, he saw at Torre di Vadi a whale or some other kind of sea-monster that had been discovered lifeless on the shore. It was a hundred feet long and its spine had sixty vertebrae, of which seven were carried to Volterra, each one the size of a horse’s saddle. 3
