Whale skeleton reassembled in Tacoma
TACOMA, Wash. —A whale that beached itself and died in Seattle last year is slowly taking shape - bone by giant bone - in a vacant Tacoma storefront.
Marine biologist Rus Higley, his Highline Community College staff and a volunteer team are bleaching and assembling the gray whale skeleton on the 300 block of Puyallup Avenue.
Sometime after July 4, the bones will be moved to the Foss Waterway Seaport to be rearticulated into a lifelike configuration. Later this year the skeleton will be hung in a display area in Des Moines, where Higley works as an instructor and the manager at the Marine Science and Technology Center.
The young whale beached itself in April 2010 a half mile south of the Fauntleroy ferry dock in West Seattle. It was alive when found; video shows the whale thrashing in the water. It died soon after.
The whale might have been on its spring migration from Mexico, or could have been a year-round resident of Puget Sound. What caused it to beach itself and die was never determined.
During a necropsy (an animal autopsy) its stomach was found to contain a sweat pants leg, duct tape, a Ziploc bag and a golf ball. Higley said those items didn't kill the whale but, "it couldn't have helped."
The whale had no obvious injuries and did not appear excessively thin, but the last few bones of its tail exhibit a gruesome calcification.
"That's indication of damage or disease," Higley said.
When a whale washes up on a beach it becomes the land owner's responsibility. The catch: You can't keep it unless you have permission from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Higley said.
Once NOAA granted Higley possession of the gray whale, it was towed to an undisclosed location in Pierce County for a necropsy by State Fish and Wildlife and Cascadia Research.
That's when Higley and a volunteer crew got involved. He estimates the whale weighed about 40,000 pounds.
"It took three of us to drag the flipper along the ground," he said.
The team used big kitchen knives to carve up the remains, a process called cleansing. The fibrous blubber constantly dulled the knives during the off-and-on job.
"I had one person sharpening the knives the whole time," he said.
Getting volunteers to help carve up the quickly decomposing whale was easy, even with Higley's pitch to potential volunteers: "At the end of the day you're going to throw your clothes away.
Giant Human Bones - News
A whale that beached itself and died in Seattle last year is slowly taking shape - bone by giant bone - in a vacant Tacoma storefront. By CRAIG SAILOR No comments have been posted to this article. A whale that beached itself and died in Seattle last
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It was originally found near a location, known as the Old Vero site, where human bones were discovered side-by-side with the bones of extinct Ice Age animals in an excavation from 1913 to 1916. The team examined the elemental composition of the
The Real Story of Vero Beach Wasn't Ancient Mammoth Art but Rather ...
There could be no better metaphor for modern science, particularly archaeology than Dr. Zaius from the movie “Planet of the Apes”.
When that Minister of Science found the talking human doll in a cave which would have overturned his scientific paradigm he had the cave sealed and the eyewitnesses arrested.
This week, the Huffington Post published a story about ancient mammoth art discovered at Vero Beach Florida which managed to both bury the lead and to seal the real archeological experience of North America in a cave, metaphorically speaking.
Seriously? Are you kidding? There have been literally hundreds of prior discoveries of “prehistoric” art in the Americas depicting animals with trunks. The problem was, mainstream archeology had decided and pronounced that elephants or “animals with trunks” had not lived in North America and so discounted all evidence to the contrary.
A few examples of art depicting animals with trunks are shown at the top of the page. Another famous example is a pictograph discovered in the Grand Canyon in 1924 by Samuel Hubbard Jr. along with dinosaur and human footprints, petrified giant human bodies and pictographs showing dinosaurs. This was the Doheny Expedition and Hubbard had brought along Charles Gilmore, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology of the Museum of Natural History to certify his discoveries.
In the Vero Beach find we had the same pedantic initial skepticism but this time the paradigm was unable to relegate the piece to the cave and it has been grudgingly accepted. Now the field is trying to feign excitement about it. And what of all those other pieces of trunked art that have been discovered over the past three hundred years? Can you imagine that now that science has to admit that the mammoth was here in ancient times after all that nevertheless this is the first and only representation of the huge creature ever found?
As to burying the lead, Vero Beach, Florida first became famous and controversial back in 1917 when then State Geologist and later Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology, Elias Sellards and colleague reported that they had found numerous bones, fossils, weapons etc. of “modern” men from 10 to 12 feet tall, along with the bones of extinct creatures and giant reptiles in Pleistocene strata. Given that scientific report and the controversy it engendered, why in the world is anyone talking about an etching of a mammoth on bone?
Giant Human Bones - Bookshelf
Mysterious Creatures, A Guide to Cryptozoology
A partial list of places where Giant human skeletons have been reported ... Significant sightings: The earliest known discovery of giant's bones was near ...Popular Mechanics
Among the remains there is no trace of human bones or weapons, so .it is apparent ... which looked something like hippos but had huge tusks; a huge birdlike ...Early modern humans at the Moravian Gate, Mladec Caves and their remains
7 The story of the giant found in the cave made even scientists think that in 1826 a large amount of human remains was removed from the cave together with ...The art and archaeology of Florida's wetlands
Animals of habitat 2 include the extinct giant land tortoise, ... None of the human bones recovered from the basin depression date as old as the ...California outlook ...
The possible association of the human remains with extinct species, such as the giant Teratornis, may indicate some antiquity for the human being, ...Casual Knowledge Directory
Unexplained Mysteries - Giant Bones: A Big Deal, or Merely ...
Specifically, how it seemed to be a common ocurrence that human-like bone remains, often of giant proportions, were known for popping up everywhere in ...
Human Giants
Did a race of Human giants walk the earth before us? The American Indians think so. ... on the photo of one of the cave giant's jaw bone and dental cast of a regular man's teeth. ...
About Facts Net
It certainly does make the whole idea of giant humans hard to sell. ... For example http://news24.com has a story about giant human bones being discovered on a Pacific island. ...
"Stan Grist's resources for gold prospecting, metal detecting ...
Giant Human Remains - From records and sources all over the world. ... 9. At Le Crescent, Wisconsin, mounds were found to contain giant bones. ...
Have any large / giant human skeletons / bones been found ...
Have any large / giant human skeletons / bones been found? Some large humaniod bones have been found, but a whole skeleton is just too much to realistically hope for. ...