Delphinus boryi - Bory's Dolphin

 

 

Species: Bory's dolphin, delphinus Boryi. (Not illustrated.) New species.

Essential characteristics: Rather long beak, very flattened and quite broad near the head; head not very high; dorsal fin positioned equidistant from the tip of the snout and the body, a very soft mouse-gray; underside bluish-gray, sides of the head ivory-white, clearly separated rom the colour of the upperparts by a straight line.

Dimensions: Size of the Common Dolphin.

Description and Location: We owe to the friendship of Colonel Bory de Saint-Vincent, one of our most zealous naturalists, the communication of a very good drawing of this species, as well as the short description he gave of it, which we have just reported.

He encountered it at two different times, between the islands of Madagascar, Île de France [Mauritius], and the Mascarene Islands. Its habits seemed similar to those of the dolphins of our seas [France]. Upon capturing one, the sailors were struck by the white color on the side of its head, which included the eyes. They likened this color, so clearly separated from the gray of the top of its skull by a very straight and sharp lateral line, to a mustache. The bluish stripes or transverse bands on the underside of its body disappeared almost entirely after the animal's death.

Captain Mylius [Pierre Bernard Milius], the last governor of Mascarene, since his return to France, has given Mr. Bory de Saint-Vincent a picture of an absolutely identical dolphin, but of a very pale Capuchin color, which he had found on the western coast of New Holland [Australia], in the Baie des Chiens-marins [Shark Bay].

    - Desmarest, Mammalogie, ou, Description des espèces de mammifères Part 2, pages 513-514

 

This dolphin description is a bit older than my recent entries, coming from 1822. I’ve found that the further back in natural history you go, the more outlandish the cetaceans tend to get, although this dolphin’s description is fairly mundane. The main reason I wanted to draw it was not due to the description alone, but rather because of how much the associated illustration deviates from the description.

 

This illustration was reproduced in a handful of subsequent books, and its grotesqueness stood out to me.

The book it comes from, Mammalogie ou description des espèces des Mammifères (1820) by Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest, was a compendium describing all known mammals at the time, including extinct ones. Also notable is that Desmarest made use of binomial nomenclature (the two part scientific name), which wasn’t always followed at the time. Carl Linnaeus established the basic rules of binomial nomenclature in Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, but it evidently took a while to catch on, roughly a century.

But back to the illustration. For this series, I usually pick cetaceans that haven’t been illustrated, haven’t been illustrated recently or haven’t been illustrated very well. This is a case of the latter. The dolphin’s namesake is colonel Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent, another French naturalist better known for his work in botany than zoology, who relayed the physical description. Desmarest appeared to collaborate with him on several occasions. An illustration is mentioned, potentially created by Pierre Bernard Milius, but it is not provided with the original description which explicitly notes there is “Non figure”. I’d like to assume that the illustration that shows up in later publications is based on Milius’ image, but I have no idea. At the moment, I believe the oldest book to include the Delphinus boryi illustration is Complements de Buffon, published 18 years (1838) after Desmarest’s original description. The illustration shares its page with an illustration of the Crowned Dolphin.

Bory de Saint-Vincent – naturalist, colonel, and avid proponent of scientific racism.

 

This illustration is not terribly reflective of the original description. Even Hershkovitz notes in his 1966 Catalog of Living Whales (p. 197) that “color of figure only vaguely resembles description in text”. Jefferson 2021 (p. 62) suggests that the animal being described might possibly be a Pantropical Spotted Dolphin.

The illustration copied in Die vollständigste Naturgeschichte der Vögel

 

I have my own theory regarding this vague illustration, which is that it was based on a dead dolphin, not a living one.

The best time to illustrate a whale is when you have a dead one because they are incredibly hard to observe accurately at sea. If you look at old illustrations, you will notice a trend of dead and beached whales, some looking rather poorly and others looking surprisingly indifferent given the circumstances.

Most of these illustrations appear to be made after recently dead cetaceans, but my theory is that the Bory’s Dolphin image depicts a dolphin that is starting to decompose. As beached dolphins decompose, their skin goes dark and taut, pulling back to reveal their teeth and, as decomposition progresses, reveal the shape of the skull. The beak in the illustration looks remarkably skull-like to me, and perhaps the weird Fulmar-like cere at the base of the beak is skin pulling back from the bone. I don’t have any proof of this beyond how the drawing looks, I don’t know the conditions this was sketched in, this is just a hunch of mine.

Image source

On a slightly lighter note…

Here’s my Bory’s Dolphin illustration acting as a luggage identifier at Furnal Equinox 2026. Bory’s Dolphin was one of the first drawings I made for this project and I was exceptionally proud of it because it genuinely looked like something you might seen in a field guide.