>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah#Scientific_speculation
>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".