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Blue whale skeleton to get new home in WA Museum after a painstaking restoration process

August 15, 2018 | In the Press

From ABC.net.au (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-16/blue-whale-skeleton-to-get-new-home-in-wa-museum/10120400)

For more than 100 years, a 24-metre-long blue whale skeleton has left children and adults alike in awe as they stared at the bones of the largest-known animal species while visiting the WA Museum.

Now the much-loved skeleton is being meticulously restored before it is displayed in the new museum, suspended from the ceiling as if swimming through the air.

The giant exhibit currently lies disassembled and each individual piece wrapped in protective plastic at the museum's vast Welshpool collections centre — an enormous shed-like structure housing thousands of exhibits from old children's toys, to vintage cars and even a meteorite.

For the past year, conservators have been assessing each of the 194 bones for damage and restoring them, while also trying to slow down the natural organic breakdown of the bones.

They are being prepared for display in Hackett Hall when the new museum building is completed in 2020.

Canadian firm Cetacea, which specialises in skeleton exhibits and which spectacularly hung a blue whale skeleton from the roof inside London's Natural History Museum, has been hired to the job.

The whale's skull alone weighs 800 kilograms and may have to be installed before the glass panels of the new building are put in place.

"There's a lot of new research about blue whales, about how blue whales feed," Mr Coles said.

"So, we're hoping they might be able to present it in that way.

"It will be in a very animated state, possibly in a roll. We just need to work out if we can fit it in that way."

An age-defying process
Before even reaching that stage, there is another 18 months of cleaning and preparation ahead for the bones.

There is damage simply from their age. The blue whale was found washed up at the mouth of the Vasse River near Busselton in 1898 by Daisy Locke.

It stayed there for three years, as museum taxidermist Otto Lipfert, with the help of two Japanese fishermen, stripped the flesh from the carcass and let the bones bleach.

The skeleton was then taken to Perth where it was displayed in an open-faced shed from 1903 to 1968, before moving into the old Francis street museum and exhibited until 2003.

"This one was one of the more damaged ones, so we've had to do quite a lot of work on it, removing wax and consolidating broken sections," Ms Pohl said.

Now, the residual wax is being picked off and there have been a few surprises along the way.

"When we were first inspecting one of the mandibles, the jaw bones behind us, we found bubble gum. So we don't know how that got there," Ms Pohl said, breaking into laughter.

It has been a learning experience on the biology of whales and the way they break down over time for the conservators.

"One of the wonderful things about being an object conservator is you do everything from tiny toy trains to a whale," Sarah Murray said.

"This is definitely the biggest thing I've ever done, and it's going to look fantastic. Once we can sit underneath it and look underneath and go, 'ooh, wow'."

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