Cleaning the bones of a Blue Whale

The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever existed on this planet.
How big? Try over 170 tonnes in mass, and more than 33 metres in length. Think of the blue whale as a mountain of meat.

Still not sure how large one of these cetaceans can be? Check out this infographic:


This is from National Geographic's "Kingdom of the Blue Whale," a two-hour look at the life of this mysterious leviathan.

My tape, on the other hand, is about prepping one of these whales for display in a museum.
I went down to the boatyard in Victoria, BC to speak with Michael deRoos, a master skeleton articulator who is in the process of de-greasing and cleaning the bones. The skeleton comes from a 27 m long whale that washed up on a Prince Edward Island beach in 1987.

After being buried for twenty years, this whale was cut-up, put into two refrigerated containers and shipped to Victoria. The bones were then placed in giant vats filled with a bacterial culture to draw out the hundreds of litres of grease in a whale skeleton.

And this is where my story begins...

This piece first aired on On the Island, and later on the PEI morning show. The voices you hear are Gregor Craigie, me (Sterling Eyford,) and Michael deRoos.

This blue whale articulation is unprecedented, because never has a corpse of a blue whale been cleaned and mounted. Sure, you can see skeletons, but they were never saved and handled from the graveyard to the museum.

To find out more about this project, got to Project:Blue Whale at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum.

The next time I go to see the bones, I promise to take some pictures.

Check out the whale being buried in 1987.

Now, watch them dig it up!