By KENNETH LIPP/YachatsNews
Newport will soon be the home of one of the largest animals to ever roam the Earth — a near-complete skeleton of a 70-foot long blue whale.
Speaking to reporters Thursday in a South Beach marine storage facility holding the whale’s skeleton, dinosaur reconstruction expert Frank Hadfield said sauropod-type dinosaurs were longer than whales, but none came close in terms of sheer mass. Blue whales can weigh upwards of 300,000 pounds, many times more than brachiosaurus or brontosaurus.
Hadfield, president of Dinosaur Valley Studios of Alberta, Canada, stood between the whale’s massive spine and piles of ribs and other bones with Lisa Ballance, director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute.
Ballance said it’s rare for a blue whale to wash up intact where humans will come in contact with it – the last known example in Oregon was more than 200 years ago.
The blue whale in the South Beach storage facility washed ashore near Gold Beach in 2015. A necropsy found the whale was emaciated and had suffered blunt force trauma, likely from a ship strike.
Ballance said her predecessor, Bruce Mate, envisioned the find as an important educational and research tool. The Marine Mammal Institute brought the body to Newport and submerged bags of tissue and bone in Yaquina Bay for three years. Salt water and marine scavengers did their work, eating away the flesh. In late 2019 OSU brought the bags to the surface with the intention of beginning the assembly process. But like so many projects, that was delayed by the pandemic.
After a successful fundraising campaign — they’ve raised about $250,000 to start the process and need about $150,000 more to finish — OSU and Dinosaur Valley staff are this week packing up and shipping the bones to Hadfield’s Alberta studio. There they will finish the cleaning and preservation process before bringing the skeleton back for permanent display in Newport, likely outside the Gladys Valley Marine Studies Center in South Beach.
The whale
Most blue whales migrate during the summer from polar feeding grounds to winter breeding grounds near the tropics. They typically stay far offshore.
It’s not clear how old the Gold Beach blue whale was when it died because the species is difficult to date.
“They have somewhat indeterminate growth, which means that they grow quickly and then as they age, the growth slows down,” Ballance said. “But obviously we think a 90-foot whale is older than a 70-foot whale. This was an adult male, and that’s essentially all that we can tell.”
She said it’s also difficult to age baleen whales such as the blue because teeth are typically used to date mammals. Baleen whales don’t have teeth.
The Gold Beach whale might not be the most massive of its species, but you wouldn’t know it looking at its bones filling the storage facility. The dozens of car wheel-sized vertebrae of the spine stretch from the rolling door to the back of the room. Most of the floor is covered with other bones of various sizes. Two huge mandibles – jaw bones about 17 feet long and 700 pounds – sit outside on pallets, one partially suspended by a forklift.
As tragic as the whale’s demise, Ballance said, its discovery was fortuitous for researchers trying to understand more about the animal whose day-to-day activity and life cycles very little is known.
Putting it back together
Hadfield said burying animal remains — in water, dirt, sand or even horse manure — is the best way to remove tissues and some oils without damaging the bone. Most of the oils are already gone from this skeleton, he noted, adding that they typically have a much stronger smell for longer.
Hadfield’s firm specializes in creating natural history displays for museums, academic institutions and even movies. He got his start hunting and digging up dinosaurs near his home in Alberta’s badlands, one of the best places in the world to do so.
He said he reached out to the Hatfield Marine Science Center when he learned about the whale while searching the internet for a relative with their similar last name as the science center. This will be his largest reconstruction.
The skeleton – which would normally have 365 bones – is not 100 percent complete. They’ve been unable to locate the vestigial pelvis, an evolutionary relic from marine mammals’ time as terrestrial animals that now floats freely in the abdomens of whales, dolphins and porpoises. They still hope it will turn up. The cranium was badly crushed either in the collision with the ship or after, and the pieces now sit in a bin inside the facility. They’re also missing the sternum.
Hadfield’s team will fabricate any missing sections out of foam with a computerized carver. They used the same machine to create a 6-foot model of a possible full, final product.
The skeleton has one component that’s a rare find — an articulated appendicular bone, or the flipper with its “fingers.” Those bones are just inches long.
“It’s extremely rare to have that. There’s probably five examples of a blue whale flipper that’s still in articulation,” Hadfield said. “And as fabricators and in reconstructing this, that information is gold to us, because now we know the distance between the elements. We’ll share that information with colleagues and scientists.”
As part of the preparation process, they’ve already pressure washed the skeleton, and it will get a further surface cleaning in Alberta before a hydrogen peroxide bath. That will somewhat whiten and also eliminate more unwanted oils and material.
It’s possible the bones could be given a polyurethane coating if the outdoor display location is selected. This will protect them from wear and UV radiation. The steel frame they’ll build to hold the skeleton will use an external cradle system, allowing them to avoid drilling into the bones.
“Our goal in all of this is to reconstruct the skeleton as it would have been in life,” Hadfield said.
“The whole idea is to breathe life into this skeleton,” agreed Ballance.
Hadfield couldn’t say how long before delivery back to Newport. They wanted to move quickly, he said, but also meticulously.
There’s also the matter of the last $150,000. Ballance said fundraising efforts are ongoing via the Marine Mammal Institute’s “Building a Blue Whale” web page.
“No donation is too small,” Ballance said. “It takes a village to build a blue whale.”
- Kenneth Lipp is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at KenLipp@YachatsNews.com