Rare 70-foot-long blue whale skeleton to be displayed in Newport, but first it has to go to Canada

A rare blue whale skeleton could be ready for display at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport as early as the end of 2023.

Thursday morning, crews with Dinosaur Valley Studios loaded up the hundreds of bones from a storage facility in South Beach to transport to Alberta, where the bones will be reassembled.

“We’re going to get them back to Canada, start the hydrogen peroxide soak, clean them, repair any damage and then start the mounting process onto the steel armature,” said Frank Hadfield, president Dinosaur Valley Studios. Reconstructed, the skeleton will be more than 70 feet long and 20 feet wide. “The size of a semi tractor,” Hadfield said. “It’s going to be a big specimen.”

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The plan is to display the articulated skeleton by the new Glady’s Valley Marine Studies Building on the Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marie Science Center campus, said Lisa Ballance, director of the Marine Mammal Institute.

“It’s right alongside the vertical evacuation ramp and it’s going to be the perfect place for this,” Ballance said. “It will be displayed as though it’s swimming through the water. Frank’s vision, and I agree 100 percent with this, is to breathe life into this skeleton to not just make it a static skeleton, but to evoke the image of a real live animal, to increase the impact of the awe that a blue whale inspires.”

The whale carcass washed ashore in 2015 near Gold Beach, the first known beached blue whale in Oregon in more than 200 years. Institute emeritus director Bruce Mate and stranding coordinator Jim Rice lead a team of 45 OSU students, staff and faculty, as well as local volunteers to dismember and salvage the bones, then transport them to Newport. A necropsy indicated the whale had starved. The bones were stored in makeshift bags repurposed from fishing nets and lowered by crane into Yaquina Bay, where they were anchored by chains to the seafloor. For three years, divers monitored the remains, which, cleaned of the flesh, were removed from the water in 2019.

“The bones of the largest animal that has ever lived on earth, that is quite a spectacular thing,” Mate said in an interview for The Oregonian/OregonLive last fall. “There are 356 bones. The whales can reach over 100 tons — just an unfathomable amount of weight. All those things we wanted to bring home to people by showing the skeleton. It’s just so breathtaking.”

Hadfield hopes to have the studio’s work done by fall 2023. Once the skeleton is complete, it will be shipped back to Newport, where it will be mounted for display. “We hope to have it ready by next spring,” Ballance said. “At the very earliest, by the end of the calendar year. We sure are going to try for that.”

One of the challenges of the project is the animal’s “sheer size,” Ballance said. “A blue whale contains 365 bones ranging in size from tiny to enormous. For example, the mandible, or jaw bones, are 18 feet long.”

This is the largest project Dinosaur Valley Studios has undertaken, Hadfield said. “The good news is the integrity of these bones is beautiful; they are in really great condition.”

To date, Marine Mammal Institute has raised about $250,000 toward the project.

“We could have never gotten this far without those generous gifts,” Ballance said. “We are still trying to raise another $150,000. We gratefully accept any donations. No amount is too small. It takes a village to build a blue whale.”

For more on fundraising, “Help us build a whale,” visit: beav.es/bones

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