MUSEUM OF NATURE

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31209, 5 November 1966, Page 13

MUSEUM OF NATURE

The Biggest Animal

(Contributed by Canterbury Museum)

ON February 17, 1908, news was received in Christchurch that a huge V whale 99 feet long, had been found lying dead on the ocean beach near Okarito on the West Coast It was described as being so high that a man on horseback could not see over it.

The curator of the Canterbury Museum, Edgar R. Waite, set off post-haste for Okarito. The whale proved to be only 87 feet long—if the word “only” can be used in such a context —and to belong to the species known as the Blue Whale, the largest animal that has ever existed. In an article written for the “Weekly Press,” Mr Waite described his first impressions:

“Having breasted Commissioner’s Point we looked down to the beach and there saw what resembled a large vessel bottom upwards. This was the whale. No words of mine can convey the slightest idea of the enormous mass spread before us. “You may step out 87 feet but you cannot realise the bulk of the creature. The men who claimed the carcase had cut away some of the blubber, and the escaping oil saturated the sand all around. The effect of this was very noticeable on the would-be breakers; far from the vicinity of the whale they were smoothed down and an attempt to wash the hands in the sea seemed only to add a little more oil to them. “The whale had been lying dead on the beach for two weeks when we first saw it—so there was another noticeable and memorable feature in connexion with it I cannot say at what distance the odour of the dead whale was apparent but it was confidently predicted that both my taxidermist and myself

would lose our breakfasts, as others had done, but we proved to be superior to such a trifle.” Five months later, thanks mainly to Mr Waite and to Edgar F. Stead, the entire whale skeleton had been rescued and delivered to the Canterbury Museum. Today it graces the Garden Court in association with a display of relevant material including a fully equipped whale-boat, try-pots for rendering blubber, harpoons and the like.

30 cwt Lower Jaw A silhouette of the assembled skeleton seemed an appropriate emblem for this series, “Museum of Nature,” since it is quite the most impressive single item on display at the Canterbury Museum. However, there has been a surprising number of inquries—“The thing, the Museum of Nature thing, what is it?” Possibly it was not recognised because there was no yardstick. Be it now said that the head alone is four times as long as a tall man, that the skeleton is twice as long as a good-sized house, that the bones of the lower jaw alone weighs a ton and a half.

The largest specimen of the Blue Whale on record was a 113 ft monster weighing about 160 tons. Be that as it may, it is an apocryphal claim in the Museum that “Ours is the second largest in captivity.”

The Largest To the inevitable query “Where is the largest?”, we can only reply, without really knowing: “Probably in America.” There are In existence plenty of whales large enough to have swallowed Jonah, but the Blue Whale is not one of them. In life, it has in its mouth hundreds of thin plates of “whalebone” which serve to strain from the water millions upon millions of tiny sea creatures, plankton, upon which this, the largest animal of all time, lives. The specimen at the museum lacks the “whalebone,” or baleen as it should be called. Mr Waite wrote: “My opinion is that the whale had been dead for some time before it was cast on to the beach and that as the flesh rotted away, the baleen was washed out This was a sad loss to the men, for they had an offer of £lOO for the whalebone alone.” —J.G.P.