It is perhaps worth mentioning here that the story of Jonah was written in ancient Hebrew and that its authors had no opportunity, linguistic or anatomical, to allude to our modern sophistication in distinguishing fish from whales. Their phrase was "dag gadol" -- "big fish", and "fish" is the word used in the KJV. George Orwell, in his essay "Inside the Whale" was misled by the common anachronism to state that that meant it could not be a whale.