“The cleaning crew, wearing dish-washing gloves and wielding scrub brushes, looked like volunteers at a car wash. But instead of polishing hubcaps and chrome, they were using Dawn dish soap on massive bones.
On a warm day in early June, the dismantled skeleton of a 41-foot gray whale — identification number CRC-1740 — was washed and laid out in the sun to dry. The bones remain in storage at Edge Concrete Construction, the business along Mukilteo Speedway where the cleaning took place.
The whale, an emaciated male, died July 3, 2019, a week after being spotted in southern Puget Sound. That might have been the sad ending to this whale tale. Instead, the giant skeleton will become the showpiece of a gray whale exhibit in the Imagine Children’s Museum. It will be part of the Puget Sound Ecosystem Gallery in the Everett museum’s three-floor, 33,000-square-foot expansion project, due to open in 2022.” - Julie Muhlstein for The Everett Herald.
It’s not everyday we get phone calls about exhibiting an actual whale skeleton, but that’s exactly the phone call we got from the Imagine Children’s Museum last year. The first step in the process was to get the whale buried, this would prevent the skeleton from having a lingering smell. Luckily, we were able to do this at a large piece of property one of our team members own in Marysville, Wa.
After being buried for 6 months, the skeleton was once again ready to hit the road. Volunteers from the museum came out to helped clean, sort, and tag the bones at our office in Mukilteo.
Going on display with the skeleton will be a scale model of a Grey Whale calf. The model is 19 feet in length, and just over 5 feet wide without the flippers attached. We all look forward to this exhibit opening in 2022!!