Fin Whale - Museums

Museums

Several fin whale skeletons are exhibited in North America. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Los Angeles, California has an exhibit entitled the "Fin Whale Passage", which displays a 19.2 m (63 ft) fin whale skeleton collected by former museum osteologist Eugene Fischer and field collector Howard Hill in 1926 from the Trinidad whaling station (1920-1926) in Humboldt County, northern California. A steel armature supports the skeleton, which is accompanied by sculpted flukes. Science North, a science museum in Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, has a 20 m (65.6 ft) fin whale skeleton collected from Anticosti Island hanging from the fourth floor of their main building.

Several fin whale skeletons are also exhibited in Europe. The Natural History Museum of Slovenia in Ljubljana, Slovenia, houses a 13 m (42.5 ft) female fin whale skeleton – the specimen had been found floating in the Gulf of Piran in the spring of 2003. The Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest, Hungary, displays a fin whale skeleton hanging near its main entrance which had been caught in the Atlantic Ocean in 1896 and purchased from Vienna in 1900. The Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, in Cambridge, United Kingdom, exhibits a nearly 70 ft (21 m) male fin whale skeleton, which had stranded at Pevensey, East Sussex, in November 1865.

The Otago Museum, in Dunedin, New Zealand, displays a 16.76 m (55 ft) fin whale skeleton, which had stranded on the beach at Nelson at the entrance of the Waimea River in 1882.