Massive blue whale skeleton being turned into a display by fabricators at Dinosaur Valley Studios

East Coulee fossil specialists have spent close to three years cleaning and mounting blue whale bones on a steel structure to be displayed at a U.S. university.

The blue whale is the largest animal to ever live on earth and fabricators at Dinosaur Valley Studios in East Coulee, Alta., are taking a 21-metre skeleton and mounting it on a steel structure to become a public exhibition.

It’s a massive job that’s taken three years so far.

“Right now, we’re in the homestretch,” said Frank Hadfield, Dinosaur Valley Studios president. “We have the armature completely finished, all of the bones have their cradles, they’re in place, we’re happy with how everything is articulated now, it’s going to be the matter of just prepping and coating the armature for protection from the elements so it doesn’t rust and coating the bones as well so that they’re more durable outside as well.”

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The project is funded by the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University.

The adult male blue whale was discovered in 2015 on a beach, rolling in the surf on the Oregon Coast.

Researchers aren’t sure exactly how the animal died, but say it was emaciated and had a number of visible wounds from killer whales and a crushed skull likely from a ship strike.

“It was one of the first strandings of a blue whale in Oregon in a very long time, potentially in a couple hundred years,” said Barb Lagerquist, research coordinator at Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. “Lewis and Clark actually have in their logbooks that they saw a dead blue whale on the beach in Oregon in 1806.”

“It was an incredible opportunity for us to learn from the animal, but also to recover the animal with the ultimate desire to articulate the skeleton and put it on display at Hatfield Marine Science Center, which is where the Marine Mammal Institute is housed.”

Lagerquist says it took nine days to remove the flesh from the bones, then the skeleton was placed in a series of bags and put back into the ocean.

“They were sewed up into these fishing net bags, and we lowered it into the bay here in Newport to let marine organisms try and clean as much tissue off the bones as possible,” she said. “Then in 2019, three years later, we raised it out of the bay.”

But the bones still contained a lot of oil that had to be cleaned out by the team at Dinosaur Valley Studios.

“There was a lot of conservation we had to do to these bones,” said Hadfield. “They were still saturated to varying degrees with oil, the mandibles alone - the lower jaws - we probably purged 150 pounds per jaw of oil out of each one.”

Hadfield says what makes this project special is the size of the skeleton; it takes up the entire studio space and then some.

“We worked on a lot of killer whales, a sperm whale, humpback whale and we potentially have a minke whale coming from Newfoundland,” he said. “We worked on a partial blue whale in British Columbia, but for a full skeleton like this in our studio, this is the largest whale specimen – the largest creature we’ve ever worked on.”

Hadfield and his team have come up with a way to mount each bone in the skeleton so it can be easily removed and studied by researchers.

Bones and the frame have to be able to survive earthquakes and tsunami-like weather events on the west coast.

“That’s a real challenge that we had to consider through it,” he said. “A lot of the fabrication and the style of mounting, and that it has to sustain wind and sun and rain and all the elements in a pretty wet environment.”

The team assessed the crushed skull and determined that it would take too long and cost too much to try and fix, so they fabricated a new one out of foam and steel.

“We carved this scale model just so we could get a ballpark of what exactly you want to do with the skull, how we want to put it together, how we want to mount it,” said Eddie Dahm, lead artist. “It’s easier when you make a miniature.”

Jason van Kleef, a fabricator, was tasked with repairing many of the bones that were broken when the whale came ashore.

“The whole left side was damaged because it was laying on its left side on the beach, and so all the ribs we had to fix. We had to reproduce some of some longer pieces,” he said. “Inside the bone – it’s very porous – so we use an expanding glue or expanding foam which covers as much area as possible, after that we’ll sculpt it to make it look as natural as possible.”

Lagerquist says the finished exhibit should arrive at the institute in May, where it will be put on public display.

She says the facility typically sees more than 150,000 guests annually and this blue whale skeleton will be an educational tool.

“This is the largest animal ever to live on the planet and [visitors will] look right at it; they’re within feet from it, so that in itself is pretty awe inspiring,” she said.

“We’re going to have signage that explains how we got the blue whale and what the plight of blue whales are, they’re endangered and their population in the eastern North Pacific is only about 1,900 animals.”