Sperm whale of the Society for Marine Mammalogy, the largest international association of marine mammal scientists in the world, officially uses "Physeter macrocephalus" when publishing their definitive list of marine mammal species. The sperm whale is the largest toothed whale, with adult males measuring up to long and weighing up to . By contrast, the second largest toothed whale (Baird's Beaked Whale) measures and weighs up to . The Nantucket Whaling Museum has a -long jawbone. The museum claims that this individual was long; the whale that sank the "Essex" (one of the incidents behind "Moby-Dick") was claimed to be . A
On Top of the Whale any such encounter is inevitably a game in which the 'objects' of ethnographic inquire are dissimulating themselves and this dissimulation is inevitably subject to further distortions in its interpretations". Several themes that come forth in "On Top of the Whale" include Life, Survival, Love, Reality, Illusion, Marxism and Civilization. It could be treated as a parodic version of a problematic cross-cultural "first contact", in colonial settings. Its emphasis is on the anthropologists attempt to understand native culture and unintentionally harming it as a result. On Top of the Whale On Top of the Whale () is a 1982 Dutch surreal