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The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is Vancouver’s natural history museum. We work to promote a greater understanding of, and collective responsibility for, the biodiversity of British Columbia, Canada, and the world. We invite you to let curiosity curate your experience in our active research collection where you can peer into cabinets and open drawers. Come visit us - we’re located at 2212 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC. You can find more info at beatymuseum.ubc.ca |
Just another reason Vancouver is Awesome – we already have a blue whale hanging in our natural history museum!
Big Blue hanging in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum Atrium.
The media is swimming with news about the Royal Ontario Museum taking one of the dead whales found in Newfoundland and turning it into a museum display. The ROM’s team has already broken it down and shipped pieces to Toronto, and the next step is to bury it with the hopes that decomposers in the soil will break down all of the rotting flesh on the animal. After a year or so, they’ll dig it up again and prepare it for display.
Lucky for us, we’ve already been there and done that. And experienced the stench. Christopher Stinson, Curatorial Assistant at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, was a part of the team that dug up our blue whale (fondly named big blue) and has a few tips for the ROM team’s upcoming, smelly task:
1. Save up for some new clothes
Imagine a job where your clothes are so smelly, you have to take them off before using the Port-A-Potty, in case you “stink up” the john. There is no amount of washing that will bring those clothes back. Chris counts a backpack, belt, 2 shirts, a pair of pants, and several pairs of underwear as casualties of the project. A small sum, however, in comparison to the trailer that had to be replaced after the team drove around in it.
2. Turn work into play
Tired of constantly streaking stinky whale goo across your face every time you scratch your ear or push your glasses up your nose? Make it into a game! Chris recommends, “Who’s the dirtiest?” as a great end-of-day pick-me-up. And of course, bets on who will take a bite of rotten blue whale blubber are always welcome.
Digging up the Beaty Biodiversity Museum’s blue whale in PEI. Photo by Chris Stinson.
3. Take a couple of days off when the job is done
It doesn’t matter if you stand in the shower constantly, scrubbing until you are raw, you won’t want to schedule any meetings with important people until you’ve sufficiently aired out. Stay at home for a bit when you finish this smelly task – your colleagues will thank you.
Want to know more about the project that brought Big Blue to the Beaty? Come to the museum to see Big Blue live (so to speak) and watch the documentary Raising Big Blue. Best of all, we have awesome volunteers who are ready to tell you more about these amazing creatures, and even give you a whiff of bottled “eau de rotting whale”.
