I heard about the whale fossils years ago: that they existed, and that they were somewhere in the department of Arequipa in Peru’s south. Yet for a long time I couldn’t find a single Arequipefio who knew what I was talking about, let alone someone who could tell me the practicalities of how to get to them. Now, after a few visits to Arequipa city, the fossils have passed out of myth and become a place at the end of a bus route. The fishing village of Lomas is where we have to go. It’s a ten-hour trip from Arequipa city and the bus departs at 7.30 pm only three times per week.

I’m not sure why whales capture my imagination. Maybe it’s because while we all came out of the ocean, they decided to go back. In the desert north of Lomas, a new species of the whale family Basilosauridae, Cynthiacetus peruvianus, has been discovered and it, among all the fossilised whales, attests to this fact. It lived during the Late Eocene (34 to 40 million years ago) and had reduced, weak hind legs, an inheritance from the days when its ancestors walked the earth.