The Blue Whale Project

There will be a new museum in the University of British Columbia. And it's got a Blue Whale!

The new Beaty Biodiversity Museum is currently being built at UBC - right on Main Mall, opposite the Geology Building (where the old Engineering Annex used to be). It is slated to be finished sometime .... in the near future...

A 26-meter-long blue whale is being dug up in Prince Edward Island right now, and when it is stripped and cleaned and mounted, it will be displayed in all it's gigantic mammal-ness!

The story goes that in 1987, a blue whale washed up on a beach in Prince Edwards Island and died. The Canadian Government couldn't figure out what to do with a whale corpse the size of two city buses, so they decided to bury it in PEI's red sand until a plan could be devised.

Two decades later, The Plan is to dig up the whale and ship it the 6000 km to UBC, and display it in a glass atrium at The Beaty Biodiversity Museum!

Check out this video about the Blue Whale dig.

I can't wait to head back to my old Alma Mater and visit the new museum. And then after, I'd check out my old stomping grounds at the UBC Geology Department - the Pacific Museum of the Earth.