KYLE VAN HOUTAN:

Yeah, so this animal could have been several hundred years old and this sample is from the early 1950s. This animal, uh, could have been swimming around in the ocean before the Declaration of Independence was written. So, that's quite amazing. And all of the information here, it's not just a snapshot of the recent life of that animal, it's the entire life. It's kind of like a black box for an airplane, you know, it records all of the data that happened in that whale's lifetime.