My Date With A Blue Whale

I've experienced some pretty cool stuff in my life and this ranks as one of my top ten experiences. Over the weekend I visited the Blue Whale Project in Victoria and learned all about this amazing reconstruction project. This rivals anything that I have seen in the greatest museums in the world because I was able to encircle and touch the real bones of a blue whale. Most skeletal exhibitions are casts of the bones but these are the real vertebrae, the real gigantic jaw bone, the real ribs of a blue whale...for those of us old enough to remember, we were once taught that this largest mammal of the world was extinct. I remember reading the World Book Encyclopedia and seeing those sad words, "Extinct" beside the humble illustration of the blue whale. This blue whale was discovered off the coast of P.E.I. in 1987 and buried for twenty years before being excavated and transported to the other side of the Canada. The remarkable thing about this visit was that there were hardly any visitors at the site so there was lots of time to talk to the friendly biologists and really begin to appreciate this astounding species.