Southern Right Whale Skeleton
Nineteenth century specimen
Hanging in the air at the entrance to the marine section is the skeleton of a southern right whale, its great curved jaw arching like the ribs of a ship turned upside down. The right whale got its name from the whalers who hunted it, because it was the right whale to kill: slow, rich in oil and floating when dead. The species was almost wiped out in the nineteenth century, and this skeleton dates from that era of hunting, when whale bones arrived in Paris as trophies and scientific specimens.
Walk beneath it and look up at the skull. The upper jaw is long and narrow and once carried curtains of baleen, the flexible plates through which the whale filtered tiny crustaceans from the sea. The lower jaw bones are enormous bowed arches. Behind the skull the spine runs back in a long tapering line of vertebrae, and on either side the ribs hang like the frame of a tent. Notice the tiny vestigial pelvic bones suspended near the tail, all that remains of the hind legs of the whale's land dwelling ancestors, and one of the clearest pieces of evidence for evolution in the whole building.
The ground floor of the gallery is devoted to life in the oceans, from the sunlit reefs to the deep sea, and the whale is its centrepiece, joined by other marine mammal skeletons and the glass models of jellyfish and squid. Southern right whales have recovered somewhat since hunting was banned, and today they breed off Argentina, South Africa and Australia. This skeleton is a reminder both of how close they came to disappearing and of how large a creature can be built from bones alone.
Did You Know? A right whale's baleen plates can be more than two metres long, and the whale swims slowly through swarms of krill with its mouth open like a net.
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