In 1841 S.B. Buckley was the first to mount a skeletal restoration of Basilosaurus, but his efforts to do so have generally been forgotten. The skeleton changed hands several times during the 1840's and Buckley's more accurate restoration was overshadowed by Albert Koch's monstrous "Hydrarchos", a fantastical creature made from Basilosaurus bones.*
*[I have to admit that that I have not seen any illustrations of Buckley's restoration. My statement regarding its accuracy is based upon his technical papers in which he recognized the creature as a fossil whale and criticized Koch's restoration. It should also be noted that when Koch made a second "hydrachen" he gave it more modest and accurate proportions.]
I had been able to track Buckley's Basilosaurus to a Warren Museum in Boston, but there the trail went cold. What happened to it? I sent an e-mail to the Warren Anatomical Museum about the subject and I am happy to report that the curator there, Dominic Hall, was able to uncover what happened next.
First, Buckley's Basilosaurus was never at Warren's Anatomical Museum. It was instead installed at the Warren Museum of Natural History, also home of the famous Warren Mastodon. In 1906, however, the collection of the Warren Museum of Natural History was sold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. According to an article on the sale in Popular Science it appears that "The vertebrae with fragments of the head of a great zeuglodon, a fossil whale" were among the fossils transferred to the New York museum. This is confirmed by the annual report of the AMNH for that year and a history of the museum's collections compiled by H.F. Osborn.
If you visit the AMNH today, though, you won't find Buckley's Basilosaurus. I would have thought that such a wonderful and historically significant specimen, if it was not irreparably damaged, would be proudly displayed, but this is not so. The skeleton must be somewhere in storage. It looks like I am yet again on the trail of a long-lost piece of history at the AMNH and I will certainly write more on this subject if I am successful in tracking down this specimen.
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If the fossil is at the AMNH, it should be catalogued. I don't know if that catalog is on line. Accessions do not always get catalogued immediately. Most museum collections have a backlog of uncatalogued material. But one would not think that the case here.
It's amazing what museums have in their basements, often without the curator's knowledge. This happened with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Barosaurus bones, a magnificent specimen was down in the basement, and forgotten about. In the meantime, ironically, the curator was off to Wyoming to take a plaster cast of one in Wyoming. How he discovered his own museum's forgotten bones is here.
AMNH has a lot more than they have room to exhibit! As I recall, the current fossil mammal hall has one little alcove on whales (tucked, in keeping with current phylogenetic thought, in a diverticulum of the artiodactyl display): there is one archaeocet-ish looking skull, but I don't remember whetherr it is actually an artiodacttyl or (the exhibit is several years old, after all) a mesonychid. Buckley's Basilosaurus skull was just "fragments" according to your source, so it probably wouldn't make as good an exhibit: AMNH fossil mammal hall tries for complete skeletons or at least skulls. (Give or take a bunchy of skull-cap with horn cores in the Artiodactyl area, and -- charitably -- overlooking the pipe-work outline of IndricoBaluchiParaceratherium.)
AMNH has, and exhibited in their previous fossil mammal exhibit, a mount of Phenacodus, based on an articulated specimen -- a very early "Novitates" (I think) was a pamphlet describing the mount and scoring a point against Othniel C. Marsh as to the vertebral count. To my great regret it seemed to be in storage the last time I was there. (Given that there is currently some debate about where the Phenacodonts fit on the Placental tree-- closer to Perissodactyls or to Paenungulates? -- it's a pity it isn't out where the public can see it!)
For another Basilosaurus that has made it onto the WWWeb:
http://paleobiology.si.edu/PaleoArt/Historical/Highlights/basilosaurus…