An artistic rendering of what the blue whale display will look like when it is opened in 2010.
The Canadian Museum of Nature is in a race with the University of British Columbia to become the country’s first science centre to display the skeleton of a blue whale – a planned centrepiece exhibit when renovations at the Centretown-based museum are completed in 2010.
Putting the bones of the world’s largest animal together will be no small task for museum technicians as they begin to mount the whale skeleton this month for display in the new water gallery taking shape amid the construction cranes that have surrounded the site for years.
The 19-metre female mammal will be unveiled on May 22, 2010, when the museum reopens after five years of renovations. However, UBC is also planning to display such a skeleton – perhaps as early as 2009.
“It’s bigger than any dinosaur,” says exhibition developer Nicole Dupuis about the whale, which will be one of the first displayed in Canada. Taking up over one-third of the 2,500 sq.-metre space, it will be an impressive sight in the water gallery’s ocean exhibit.
Maureen Dougan, the museum’s vice-president, says the idea for this unique gallery came because the topic of water has become a “global issue of concern.”
She says she is happy the museum is reopening in 2010, the year of biodiversity and an important year for natural history museums.
Dupuis says the water gallery will be crammed with aquatic diversity collections that the museum has not been able to display till now, including the blue whale which has been in the museum’s possession for more than 20 years.
Curators and technicians have been working on preparing its bones for more than a year now, says Clayton Kennedy, the senior collections technician.
The whale washed ashore on Newfoundland in 1975 and was buried so that the ground’s aerobic environment could cleanse oil off its bones, explains Kennedy.
When the whale was dug up, eight years later, it became apparent that the bones required further cleansing because of a lack of biological activity.
Kennedy says the bones have been placed into giant tanks of liquid enzymes to get rid of the rest of the oil.
Dupuis said that when it was unearthed in 1983, the whale was mysteriously missing several pieces. The atlas, which connects the head to the spinal cord was nowhere to be seen.
“It’s quite large, but it’s the type of bone you can put under your arm and take home to display in your living room,” she laughs.
After mounting the whale later this month, the team will wait for the museum to finish renovations, so they can begin building it completely.
Dupuis says they are looking into different ways to display the large mammal.
One possibility is to build a cubby hole from the back, so that visitors can enter the belly and see up into the rib cage.
Other exhibits that will be showcased in the water gallery include a weather exhibit, an interactive children’s area, five aquariums and a “water and us” section, which will examine how humans impact water ecosystems.
Dupuis says she hopes the new water gallery will become a central part of the museum’s appeal.
“Right now we’re known as the dinosaur museum, but I’m secretly hoping that soon people will know us as the whale museum,” she says.