The bowhead whale is an iconic arctic species inextricably tied to Native cultures in western and northern Alaska and a rare success story in marine mammal conservation. In spring of 2021, the museum and partners articulated a bowhead whale skeleton of a young male harvested by Alaska Native hunters in 1963 near Utqiaġvik and in the museum’s possession since 1965. The whale skeleton is now suspended in the museum’s lobby.
As the crew worked to clean and repair, drill and cut and shape and attach the bones together, the height of the pandemic meant the museum’s auditorium was closed to shows–and the space was available for three months of specimen preparation, as outside the lobby ceiling was remodeled to take the weight of the bones, steel, epoxy, and silicone. Interviewed as they worked, Aren Gunderson, Lee Post, Ron Inouye, Gail Priday, and Marissa Breslin, talk about the planning, reconstruction, and mounting of one of UAMN’s largest objects.
The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North, on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples.
The bowhead whale is an iconic arctic species inextricably tied to Native cultures in western and northern Alaska and a rare success story in marine mammal conservation. In spring of 2021, the museum and partners articulated a bowhead whale skeleton of a young male harvested by Alaska Native hunters in 1963 near Utqiaġvik and in the museum’s possession since 1965. The whale skeleton is now suspended in the museum’s lobby.
As the crew worked to clean and repair, drill and cut and shape and attach the bones together, the height of the pandemic meant the museum’s auditorium was closed to shows–and the space was available for three months of specimen preparation, as outside the lobby ceiling was remodeled to take the weight of the bones, steel, epoxy, and silicone. Interviewed as they worked, Aren Gunderson, Lee Post, Ron Inouye, Gail Priday, and Marissa Breslin, talk about the planning, reconstruction, and mounting of one of UAMN’s largest objects.
The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North, on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dena people of the lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples.
To hide that pipe and to make something that looks like cartilage, we're using silicone, which is really, really tricky stuff to work with. If you've ever worked with silicone around a bathtub or something like that, it's like the Br'er Rabbit story where the moment you touch it, you're stuck to it, and then whatever you touch gets--it gets all over the place--but with the right applicator and a magical substance called bubble soap (or we were using a lot of dish soap) people are getting their hands all slimy and forming this stuff and making it look just like the cartilage that originally was in the whale.
Roger Topp:Hello, and welcome to The More You Look, your behind the scenes journey into museum collections, research, exhibition, and public programming from Fairbanks, Alaska. I'm Roger Topp, director of exhibits, design, and digital media at the UA Museum of the North and host for today's episode. The bowhead whale is an iconic arctic species inextricably tied to Native cultures in western and northern Alaska, and a rare success story in marine mammal conservation. In spring of 2021, the museum and partners articulated a bowhead whale skeleton of a young male harvested by Alaska Native hunters in 1963, near Utqiagvik and in the museum's possession since 1965--and then suspended the specimen in the museum's lobby. As the crew worked to clean and repair, drill and cut, and shape and attach the bones together, the height of the pandemic meant the museum's auditorium was closed to shows and the space was available to spend three months preparing the specimen as outside, the lobby ceiling was remodeled to take the weight of the bones, the steel, the epoxy, the silicone. The articulation process was filmed and I had the opportunity to talk with the crew members as they worked. Today, we'll hear from Aren Gunderson, Lee Post, Ron Inouye, Gail Priday, and Marissa Breslin. This is Aren Gunderson, UAMN Mammal Collections Manager.
Aren Gunderson:So, origins of the idea of hanging a whale in the lobby begins back when the building was expanded and renovated. Early 2000s. There were--there were discussions of installing hooks in the ceiling that might support a whale skeleton in the lobby. And that was actually mentioned. I saw the engineers' estimates, or the design and construction estimates that included mention of a whale skeleton. And--so at the time, the director and curators at the time were thinking about that. We're a part of the Alaska stranding network for stranded marine mammals. And that means when a whale washes up dead, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sends a veterinarian to--or a pathologist to do a necropsy of the animal and determine the health of the animal, the cause of death perhaps, and do other basic analyses on that animal. And we're notified when things are accessible, if we want to go collect. The whale skeleton, that's humpback whale, washed up dead in 2016, and they said, it's just down the bluff that Kincaid park. You can drive a truck right to the top of this bluff, and you'd have to hike the bones up this steep bluff to get it off the beach. I decided to go do that with some help from other folks at the museum. News Media was there. They were notified, local TV news and Alaska Public Media, and so it got some attention. And while I was down there with mics on and answering questions, I said, Well, I hope to have this whale, you know, articulated and assembled and on display at the museum, maybe outside the building or maybe even inside--and I was just speaking my hopes and dreams, not without--not with any funding or anything to do that sort of thing. So that got into the news. And then Ron Inouye, who is one of the museum's Friends of the Museum, this group of folks who support the museum and have some input and help with our fundraising efforts. Ron got wind of this project, of salvaging the whale, and he approached some friends of his at the Bill Stroker Foundation. And Ron Inouye knew Bill Stroeker and knew that Bill had an affinity for whales and the museum. And so he mentioned this to the Bill Stroeker Foundation trustees.
Roger Topp:Ron Inouye of the Friends of the UA Museum.
Ron Inouye:And I liked this idea of the exhibit, because it accompanies in another form, how people see and interpret what a whale is. And that, to me is very, very important. Because most of the way we know whales now are strictly from environmental standpoints where they see them as a species, one of those charismatic species that is supposed to represent the decline of civilization. Well, my goodness, whales have been around a long time, I said. People and their relationships there though most people have no clue of. And in the Arctic, it was very basic--that was survival. And that's what people don't know about. And I can remember when I first went up to Utqiagvik, to Barrow--you go into the Brower's Cafe, and they would have whale on the menu. And it was just a sign of hospitality, to offer, you know, whenever they had any available. It was--it was what people would generously share, because they were proud and whatever they had was available to whoever was interested. And I think it's in that spirit, we really need to know more about how people relate to whaling.
Aren Gunderson:So that was exciting. At that point, we steered away from the humpback whale, which I had just salvaged, to this bowhead whale that we had in the collection, because the humpback is going to take five or more years to clean up. And the bowhead whale is a much more iconic arctic, and has a much richer story to tell for Alaska, Native culture, and found only in Alaska, Canada, and North America, so...
Ron Inouye:Bill Stroeker was sort of the reason that I got interested in the whales. When I was on the Friends of the Museum board for a period of time, he would always wax about that whale skeleton that he found out in the Wein hangar. And he really thought that tourists and locals should see that. Because we're here in the Interior, not a lot of people know much about whaling. And he kept harping about it, and I'm sure they probably had to finally get that carcass out of there, because it was weaping oil and just creating a mess. But that idea was always there. And we kept pushing. And when we wanted to do something to memorialize Bill, and particularly through his foundation, we got to thinking well, that's the best thing we could do, because he really was insistent about that. And it was one tangible way that he had his connection with the museum. He was always a strong advocate. And I think, you know, in very subtle ways, he did a lot to help the museum over the years.
Lee Post:Now, should we try to get another spot, because this is going to be so big and heavy? And if so, I would propose we try to get to a fourth rib, which would be something out here.
Roger Topp:Lee Post, the guy who wrote the books on museum whale articulation.
Lee Post:These are the vertebrae of the bowhead whale that we're working on. They're sort of in order, except we've been pulling them out because we're boring the big hole through the middle of it. Getting the big hole through the middle of these big bones is probably one of the most challenging parts of getting the whale skeleton to work. And there's holes to nine sixteenths inch in diameter, and it's made for a two and three eighths inch pipe that to fit through. And that's a challenge trying to get that on there, because you can't just take a hand-drill and punch a hole through it. These things are 10 inches in diameter, or so, and it has to go exactly through the growing center of the bone. It's not the real center. If I were to measure this, measure the width and the diameter of what we're drilling through, we're not necessarily going through that center point we're going through a center point--you can imagine tree rings. The vertebrae are growing out from one spot as a fetal whale, and the bone is built up around that spot. So, we're drilling through the center of that spot. And that spot sometimes is evident on the epiphyseal plates. I just call them the cookies. That natural bellybutton is the center of where it grows from. So, that's where we're boring. The holes, that's where we're trying to drill through. And we usually start out by finding that center on each side or finding that growth plate on each side that we want to be drilling through and marking those, and then drilling an eighth inch hole an inch or so into each side of it. Then the vertebrae can be taken to a drill press. And we have a jig that we've made that this fits on, kind of a wooden box--is a plug that goes on the bottom that fits into the little hole that we drilled. And then we go halfway through the vertebra, we take it out, we flip the vertebra over and there's another plug that holds it in place. And then we go halfway through the other side. And hopefully those two holes will meet in the middle and like each other and make a make a hole that looks like that was factory made.
Aren Gunderson:January 2020, we started and the first thing to do was to get the bones clean, because that was gonna take months and months and months of time. So as soon as I had a tank large enough, I got the bones in a maceration tank, which is just a big tub of warm water. The bones were saturated with oil. They had been sitting in various locations since 1965. When the bones were collected, the skull was washed and prepared for exhibit when this building was built first in 1980. Yeah, 1980. So the skull went on display in the gallery of Alaska in 1980. And has been there since August of 2020 when we moved it outside to wash it. They've been dirty, really dirty, saturated with oils, a lot of dried tissue still inbetween the vertebrae--and on other parts--the arm had a bunch of tissue on it. So that--that took a long time to clean up and make them presentable and also not stinky. And that process was led by me. It was supposed to be me and our students, but then COVID happened in March of 2020. My students and I got it soaking in the maceration tank prior to March. But it was--when it came time to wash them all that was up to me alone since the students had left and we weren't allowing more than one person in a lab. So they--the bones soaked in warm water which is maintained at about 100 degrees and oxygenated, so there was aquarium bubblers in the water and that way bacteria are kept very happy and the bacteria just digest all of the oil and any tissue leftover on an in the bone. That's what maceration is. It's essentially putting the thing in warm water and waiting for it to be totally rotted clean. No chemicals at all, just water, and the bacteria are just naturally occurring, already in the bones, usually in the rotten tissue. For this one, since these bones had sat dry for '65 to 2020. They were so dry that I didn't think they would have the bacteria on them that would be needed, so I added a hunk of rotten sperm whale that we had received to the tank, just to get the right bacteria going. They soaked in that for four months.
Roger Topp:Gail Priday, artist and, then, museum school liaison.
Gail Priday:Not all of this bowhead whale's bones were collected for the museum. Some of the bones were missing. So, the missing bones had to be replicated. And that was done by scanning bones from other whales, scaling them to the size of this whale, and then 3D printing all those parts. One of the bowhead whale humerus bones is a well-cleaned actual bone that was harvested in 1963. And the other is a mirrored copy. It was scanned, 3D printed, and then painted by museum artists. And there are definitely some differences. If you were to look really, really close. For one thing, there are some cracks and fissures in the original and the real bone. And the real bone is a lot heavier. The plastic bones are very light. If you were to kind of tap on it, you would hear different sounds on or between the different bones. A lot of the pieces were when they were scanned--they weren't scanned as one big bone, they were scanned in several parts and then they had to be glued together. And then those glue marks had to be sanded down. But there are you know, you can still see some evidence of that seam if you, you know--if you look closely.
Aren Gunderson:So rib number three on the left side was broken into two pieces. And actually there was a segment missing that was never recovered. So our intention was first to repair all the broken pieces that we had and use them as is, but rib number three was too badly damaged and missing a large segment, so it couldn't be used. And if we wanted to rib number three to be present, we were going to have to print a brand new rib as a mirror image of the right side rib number three. The other damaged ribs could be put back together because we they were--all of the pieces were there. So one of them has a metal splint that can be seen. On the backside of the rib, there's a big plate of metal that's bolted into the rib to hold the two pieces together. And the other rib that was damaged, the damage can still be seen. It's looks like somebody took an axe to the rib, and it broke in two. But that one was fixable with an internal steel rod that cannot be seen anymore.
Roger Topp:Marissa Breslin, mammal collections curatorial technician.
Marissa Breslin:We've had a full humerus, and then we had a radius and ulna on the left side of the whale that were mostly complete. However, they were sawed off in the harvesting process. And so we've re-extended those using a water putty, which takes quite a long time to dry, but is very moldable and very sturdy. And from there, we have all of our finger bones printed and painted by our very wonderful artists. So they look quite convincing. And they've all been drilled from either side, all the way through the bone so that they can kind of be threaded on to threads like the beads of a necklace. And from there, they were bent into graceful shapes, so they don't look super straight and 'surprised hands.' And then they are fitted into our bones, which are also drilled so that they sit correctly at nice angles and will be very sturdy. And our bones are also fitted together with a much thicker all-thread, again for that kind of stability, and they have a lot less bend than a human arm. They don't really have that same elbow joint, but they have a lot more flexibility in their fingers. Their carpels, metacarpals. So it's a very similar process to our vertebrae actually were afte--they were threaded on to their wire. It's just layers and layers of silicone over multiple days letting it dry in between, and trying to make it look as nice and smooth as possible. I've been at the museum as a volunteer for two years, and I've been hired as an employee since October of 2020, which has been a very nice job to have during the pandemic, getting to work mostly by myself until working on this whale project, which has been really a dream for me because it's where art and science meet. And that's really why I love museum work in general--is because it's really seeing the beauty in nature and preserving it for everybody for decades to come.
Lee Post:In the ribcage on an animal or in this case, this whale is 26 curved pieces of huge bone that any one of them by itself might look like something that came out of the front end of an elephant. Trying to get these lined up so that they look right is probably the trickiest, hardest part of building the whale skeleton. When the ribs are all lined up correctly, becomes this really beautiful, graceful, curved form that--you no longer see the individual ribs but a lot of times when you look at this, what you're seeing is the the entire form of that ribcage. The skull--the skull is probably the biggest project on this thing, because it's the biggest bone on this thing. The skull's 14 feet long. It's easy to think of a skull just being one solid bone and all you got to do is hang this solid bone. But a skull, including your skull, is made up of about 22 loose pieces. And as you grow, or as this whale grows, those pieces will start fusing together, and on an old whale, all those pieces will be pretty well fused together. The bowhead whale seems to be an exception in the whale world even, in that these things apparently we're discovering are living for more than a couple 100 years. And as long as they are living, they're growing. As long as they're growing, these bones don't fuse together into one piece. So this skull, this 14-foot
Gail Priday:So, the bones started out--they were white. curve--banana-like shaped skull is made out of--just for the And then they were primed with a primer that was colored to match the lightest tone in the bones in the--in the natural bones. front part of the 'beak'--has about five bones in it. And And it's important to mention that in the natural bones those bones were all kind of loose and rattly. And they've there's a lot of variation in the color, you know, not just in been sitting on the the front of the skull for 50 years, and one bone is that--that's just one bone has lots of colors. But probably on the beach before they even got it here. Some even the, you know, the skull bones are a different color pieces broke off of the front of this. So, that was a project in from, you know, the vertebrae, which even have the vertebrae, itself--was just getting those pieces back on. some of them are yellower than others. Some are lighter. So just trying to find a color that sort of spoke to all of them as a light tone in the bone. And that's how we started with the primer. And then we chose a selection of acrylic paints in a variety of earthy tones such as raw sienna, raw umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, some Payne's gray, zinc, white, and we used a lot of matte medium to sort of--kind of--watered down the color to make it very thin, and apply it in many, many, many layers with natural sea sponges. We used paint brushes a little bit, but found that the sea sponges did a really good job of getting kind of a natural mottled sort of texture on there. And it was it's really--just been a process of layering and layering all those different colors on top of each other until it gets to be just about right. So one big challenge for me for applying the paint was that I had paint constantly all over my fingers because you have to pick up the little bones and hold them as you're applying the paint and they're three dimensional so you're getting it all on all sides and and then putting them down so that they could dry a little while you work on the next one. But there was just always a lot of paint on my hands and yeah, that can be--that can be messy. As a painter, I normally work with paint brushes and I paint on canvas or on wood panel and I don't tend to get paint--much paint on my fingers at all or on my clothing or my mask, as I did with this--with this project.
Lee Post:It's always been a big debate of how much coloring do we want to do to, to match and blend places where it's been stained by natural processes or some cases stained by processes of trying to clean the bone. And there's clearly two sides of of that when your question comes out from those that want it left absolutely natural. And from a certain point of view, its beautiful natural, the color ranges--that range from snow white to, to very rusty orange colors and stains to grays to sometimes greens to lots of cream colors and tan colors. And, you know, it's impossible to paint over this with any one color and have it look natural. As soon as you do that, it looks like it's been painted. We have a photograph that has been enlarged to life-size for the size of the entire vertebral column that we laid out on the floor that was already in the bend that we wanted and we drew a center line down the center of that. And that was our template for putting the pipe on as we're bending it a foot at a time to make sure it matches, because this thing is quickly going to become heavier than anybody's going to be able to lift. We do it by putting it on a metal cart that was designed to build the whale on and was custom fabricated here in Fairbanks. We can screw into the vertebrae, and then the set color squeezes the pipe. And so every one of these bones, as they go on, is held in exactly the position we want it not that they're all right the first time or the second time. But the point being is that we can easily adjust them, either the spacing between them or the alignment. They go on and on and on and off on and off multiple times before we're happy. You know, somewhere along the line, we get something mixed up and have to rearrange the order or remember, oh yeah, we have to drill a hole behind that one. And so there's a lot of back and forth, the vertebrae go on, and they don't just squish together, because you'd have a really short fat whale if you did that. For this to be accurate, we're taking the length of--the known length of the original whale and some papers that we found--actually from about 1860-ish--where they actually measured the different sections of the whale and how long each section in the whale was, and how much space went between the vertebrae. So we were able to, on this whale, get it probably more accurate than I've ever gotten a whale before. We're usually just making wild guesswork and getting it so, sort of, the final length is right, but on this one, we've got it spaced so that the different sections of the whale have the right spacing.
Aren Gunderson:From the second level above the whale, you can look down on it as if you are standing on the ice or in a kayak and you're viewing the whale as you would see it from that standpoint. And it would be diving after taking a breath. It would be diving down into the water again. Very evident should be the damage done by the explosive harpoon used to harvest the whale. And that's--that's on the left side of the whale. There are some bones that are broken and that have been remade as best we can. You can see one vertebral process is missing. That's the first cue of where the damage occurred. But then all the cracks that were created by the broken bones are left there visible. So that's viewable from the left side of the whale. And all over the whale skeleton at various places, you can see evidence of the butchering process where knives have cut into the bone and saws and axes even are used to take the meat and blubber off the bone. Various scars are left in the bone from that process. We did that on purpose, so the whole story of the harvest can be told as evidenced in the skeleton.
Lee Post:We've got different sutures all through the skull which are the kind of the cracks that define where one bone meets another bone and where the bones are actually growing, where those growth areas are. You know, when this thing gets done growing apparently, might bewhen they hit 200 years old. I don't know how old this one was, but it was still growing. So we're trying to fix some of those areas where they're--that they had some wiggle to them. And we're doing that with a lot of steel bolts and--and in some cases we're we are hiding those bolts. Sometimes we try to hide all the hardware, other times that it makes more sense to, for strength reasons, to have some of the hardware exposed in this case so that you can have washers under it. Because the bone once you drill through the outer skin of this is fairly soft, so you don't want to get too far into it. So in this case, we use some washers and put some classy little gold--they're actually brass--acorn nuts. So, this whale is very modern and hip. He's got six piercings in his nose. We've gotten the skull, got all the bones now so that the bones are all--we call it consolidating--that they have all been fastened to each other such that in theory, the skull now is is one solid piece. There's still more work that we want to do on it. There's places where the surface of the bone is cracked and crazed. It looks like--looks like some of those old paintings you've seen that are 400 years old where it looks like lots of chips of paint have been put together. Well the bone is kind of that way too. And to keep those from flaking off over time, we'll be going over those and consolidating the outside of that skin layer of bone probably with some PVA glue, which is essentially it is essentially what Elmer's glue is, and that gets watered down and and gets used in different thicknesses in different places to glue those little flakes back together and to soak into those little flakes and cracks and craze marks and and keep it so that hopefully this won't be snowing pieces of bone dust over the years.
Roger Topp:Thank you to Aren Gunderson, Lee Post, Gail Priday, Marissa Breslin and Ron Inouye for their articulate words as they worked to prepare, promote, assemble, and exhibit this massive object. Thank you to the Bill Stroeker Foundation for funding the project and the many individuals at the museum, UAF, and throughout Fairbanks that made this possible. If you have yet to walk under, around, and then above a 45-foot bowhead whale skeleton, what are you waiting for? Come to the UA Museum of the North. Come and take a look. You can't miss it. Before we go, a reminder that the UA Museum of the North's YouTube channel hosts video series documenting many of our collections, exhibits, and education work, including a detailed look into the articulation of the museum's bowhead whale. Have a look. The More You Look is a production of the UA Museum of the North on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the ancestral lands of the Dene people of the Lower Tanana River. UAMN illuminates the natural history and cultural heritage of Alaska and the North through collections, research, education, and partnerships, and by creating a singular museum experience that honors diverse knowledge and respect for the land and its peoples. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe, share, and rate the program. This helps other listeners discover more about not only the work of this museum, but quite possibly other museums in their neighborhoods. The more you look, the more you find.