Hope, the Blue Whale Skeleton
Skeleton of a whale stranded in 1891; suspended here in 2017
Look up as soon as you enter Hintze Hall and you meet Hope, the skeleton of a female blue whale caught in the act of diving towards you. She hangs twenty five metres from snout to tail, her jaws open, her enormous flipper bones spread as if she were banking through the water. Blue whales are the largest animals that have ever lived, larger than any dinosaur, and Hope shows you that scale in a way no photograph can. Her head alone is longer than a family car, and the arches of her ribs frame the Victorian ironwork of the roof like a second building inside the first.
The pose was chosen carefully. Earlier the skeleton lay flat on its belly in the mammals gallery, hard to appreciate. Now conservators have set every one of her two hundred and twenty one bones on a bespoke steel armature so that she appears to lunge upward, mouth agape, the way a feeding blue whale rises through a cloud of krill. Notice the baleen plates are gone, but the long curved lower jaw bones, the largest single bones in the animal kingdom, are original. Walk to the balcony on the first floor to see her from above and from the side.
Hope was stranded in Wexford Harbour in Ireland in 1891, and the museum bought her skeleton for two hundred and fifty pounds. In 2017 she replaced Dippy, the Diplodocus cast that had greeted visitors since 1979. The name was chosen because the blue whale, hunted almost to extinction in the twentieth century, was one of the first species that humanity decided to save, and its slow recovery is a sign of what protection can achieve.
Did You Know? Suspending Hope took months of planning and a team working through the night, because the whole skeleton had to be lifted in one piece.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.