An otherwise ordinary looking cottage in rural Nova Scotia is turning heads thanks to an unusual new lawn ornament -- a six-metre-long whale skeleton.

The bones belong to what appears to be a minke whale – likely the same one that made local headlines when it washed up on the shores of Pomquet Harbour late last fall.

Cottage owner Robert Delorey, however, simply calls it “the big one.”

“It’s different, I guess, that’s why I put it out here,” he said.

Delorey had seen the beached skeleton before, but wasn’t interested in it until a visit from a relative three weeks ago.

“My nephew Chris from Ontario and I were in the harbor boating around and we (saw) the skeleton there on the shore,” he said. “We investigated a little more and sure enough, it was all the bones, so we picked it up and took it ashore.”

It took the men two trips to move the bones to the family’s summer cottage, where they cleaned and began to reassemble the skeleton with help from the Internet.

“We didn’t know which part the tail or the head was, but (Chris) looked it up and he knew where everything went,” Delorey said, adding that he numbered the parts to make it easier to reassemble.

His cottage, located in Pomquet – about 15 kilometres east of Antigonish – has been catching the attention of neighbours and passersby ever since.

“It’s definitely different,” said neighbour Jennifer Morris, “but this is really cool, so I’m glad that they got the whole pieces.”

Neighbours say Delorey wanted to put the skeleton in front of his house instead of at the cottage, but his wife wouldn’t let him.

But Delorey says there’s nothing strange about his beachcombing discovery.

“It’s interesting,” he said. “I do a lot of fishing and everything and I guess the story was the big one that didn’t get away.”

Delorey says he plans to cover the bones with clear coating to protect them. He’ll also be putting them away over the winter in hopes of being able to show them off again in the spring.

With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Dan MacIntosh