Life Size Blue Whale
National Museum of Nature and Science · Installed 1994
Before you reach the ticket desk you pass under a whale. The great blue grey body arches out of the ground beside the path as if the animal were diving through a wave, its tail flukes lifted high and its long flippers spread, and it is exactly the length of a real adult blue whale, about thirty metres. Children run beneath it and adults stop to photograph it; it has become the museum's unofficial emblem and the landmark that tells you where the entrance is.
The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived, larger than any dinosaur, and the model lets you feel that in a way no diagram can. Walk its length and count your steps; then look at the mouth and imagine the curtain of baleen plates inside, through which the whale filters several tonnes of krill a day. The sculptors gave the body the streamlined taper and the tiny dorsal fin of the real animal, and the mottled skin pattern was based on photographs of living whales. The pose, with the head down and the tail up, is one a whale takes as it begins a deep dive.
The model was installed in 1994 to mark the opening of new galleries, and it has been repainted several times since. Blue whales were hunted almost to extinction in the twentieth century, including by Japanese fleets in the Antarctic, and are now protected and slowly recovering; the museum's marine mammal displays inside tell that story. Come back after dark if you can, when the whale is lit from below and the park is quiet.
Did You Know? The model is the same length as a real adult blue whale, about thirty metres, longer than any dinosaur skeleton inside the museum.
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