‘Picture This #9′ – ‘The Fin Whale', Museum of Zoology.

What is it?

The skeleton of a Fin Whale, suspended outside the entrance of the Museum of Zoology, which has inspired awe and affection among sightseers and scientists for the past 145 years. It is 21 metres long, and would have weighed 80 tonnes when alive.

What’s the story?

It has been auctioned three times, housed in a cricket ground and owned by the mayor of Hastings.

Like many Victorian melodramas, the whale’s tale began on a dark and stormy night. Well after sunset on a winter evening in 1865, a south-easterly gale blew the carcass of a 67 foot-long male Fin Whale onto the shingle of Pevensey Bay.

On the 29 May, 1866 the University at last got its hands on the specimen it had so long so desired. The whale finally went on display in the old Museum of Zoology in 1896. Suspended above the skeletons of an African and an Indian elephant, it stretched from one end of the gallery to the other.

When the old museum was demolished in the 1960s, the whale went into storage. The final chapter of whale’s tale begins in the mid-1980s, when the bones were cleaned and planning for installation at its current position outside the new museum began.

The team reused the original metalwork, beautifully designed and cast by the University’s Engineering Laboratory in the 1890s, and Mackay Engineering built an additional beam to suspend the whale on the podium.

Can we see it?

The Fin Whale can be seen 24-hours a day, 365 days a year as it’s outside.

The Museum of Zoology is open Monday to Friday (10am to 4.45pm) and on Saturday (11am to 4pm) except for Christmas and bank holidays.

Want to know more?

To discover more about the museum and its collections, visit https://www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk/