The blue whale skeleton in Santa Cruz

In my book A Very Typical Family, which is set in Santa Cruz, CA, Natalie’s brother Jake work as a marine biologist at Long Marine Lab in Santa Cruz, and so does Natalie’s love interest, Asier. In one scene, Natalie and Asier meet near the iconic blue whale skeleton at Long Marine Lab.

As a kid, I was a docent at Long Marine Lab. One of my jobs was to tell visitors about this 87-foot-long blue whale skeleton at what is now the Seymour Marine Discovery Center. UC Santa Cruz says it’s the world’s largest whale skeleton on display. The skeleton belongs to a 50-year-old (!!) female blue whale that died and washed ashore in 1979. (I have found two differing references as to where; suffice it to say it was somewhere in the Bay Area.)

I did find this delightfully gruesome tidbit: “Blue whale carcasses seldom wash ashore, so a team of scientists from Long Marine Lab at UCSC went to work salvaging what they could. After 15 days cutting bones free from the flesh and hauling them up a cliff (a helicopter was used to lift the 3,500-lb skull), they were cleaned and laid out on the ground at the lab for several years.”

In the mid-80s, I remember visiting this whale skeleton in a field down the road from Long Marine Lab. It was set there and arranged in more or less its form, but without any of the care or pins that it features now. The whale skeleton was eventually mounted on a steel frame and moved to the small visitor center at Long Marine Lab, which was then housed in portables.

In 1998, the skeleton was shipped to Florida at what was surely an astronomical cost (I can’t even imagine the logistics) to refurbish it. The pieces of the skeleton that were lost as a result of the decomposing carcass rolling around in the surf were recreated. (Supposedly these bones are a slightly different color so you can tell the difference from the real ones.) When it returned to Santa Cruz, having traveled perhaps farther than the whale in life had wanted to go, it was mounted next to the then newly-built visitor’s center.

The press release for the refurbishment of the skeleton at the time said that the person working on the refurbishment “will also make molds of all of the bones, enabling him to cast reproductions of the entire skeleton. Dobson plans to market reproductions of the skeleton for $125,000 each.  In return for the marketing rights, Dobson is charging a minimal fee for his restoration work, Davenport said. In addition, Long Marine Lab will receive 20 percent of any proceeds from the sale of reproductions.”

That is quite a tidy licensing deal out of a whale skeleton!

They don’t tell you this in any of the articles I found, but that blue whale, sometimes rather unimaginatively referred to as “Ms. Blue,” had some great facts. Let’s see if I can remember them from my days as a child docent:

  • The blue whale’s veins are so big that a cat could run through them
  • The blue whale’s heart is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle

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