The Blue Whale at the Core Science Facility

In the atrium of the Core Science Facility building on the Memorial University of Newfoundland campus, visitors look up to see the skeleton of a blue whale suspended over them. The whale washed ashore in Bonne Bay on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland, Canada, in 2014. The massive skeleton consists of 356 rearticulated bones. (For reference, the human skeleton consists of about 206 bones.) The whale is 75 feet long, with the skull alone reaching 18 feet.

This whale was one of two that washed ashore in 2014. Both were sent to the Royal Ontario Museum for cleaning, preparation, and preservation. After the bones were defleshed and disarticulated, it can still take two to three years to degrease the bones for display. This one was returned to Newfoundland in 2021. The atrium of the Core Sciences Facility, built between 2017 and 2021, was built to accommodate the whale skeleton. Installing the suspended cetacean took about two weeks of careful work.