On September 21st and 22nd, 2023, staff and students from four UAMN research collections excavated a humpback whale skeleton on the UAF campus. This, of course, is not its usual habitat. This was not an ancient, fossilized animal. The skeleton, salvaged from the beach at Kincaid Park, Cook Inlet, in southcentral Alaska, was brought by museum staff to Fairbanks and buried in sand for more than six years in order to allow for the continued natural decomposition of the remaining soft tissues. Maybe not all the remaining soft tissues. More on that in this episode.
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.
On September 21st and 22nd, 2023, staff and students from four UAMN research collections excavated a humpback whale skeleton on the UAF campus. This, of course, is not its usual habitat. This was not an ancient, fossilized animal. The skeleton, salvaged from the beach at Kincaid Park, Cook Inlet, in southcentral Alaska, was brought by museum staff to Fairbanks and buried in sand for more than six years in order to allow for the continued natural decomposition of the remaining soft tissues. Maybe not all the remaining soft tissues. More on that in this episode.
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.
When the wind would drop, we could just hear it. Yeah, that was just maggot soup.
Roger Topp:And you guys had to get inside it?
Kevin May:I was in waders. I think Aaron-- Were you in waders to0, when we were cutting it up?
Aren Gunderson:I had my my tall rubber boots on. I tried to stay clean.
Roger Topp:You're not kidding when you say you threw everything out.
Kevin May:Oh yeah. I took my terminal stuff.
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. On September 21st and 22nd of 2023, staff and students from four museum research collections pitched in and excavated a humpback whale skeleton on the UAF campus. This of course is not as usual habitat. This was not an ancient fossilized animal. The skeleton, salvaged from the beach at Kincade Park, Cook Inlet, in south central Alaska, was brought by museum staff to Fairbanks and buried in sand for more than six years in order to allow for the continued natural decomposition of the remaining soft tissues. Maybe not all the remaining soft tissues. More on that in this episode of the podcast.
Aren Gunderson:We are digging up a humpback whale skeleton that we buried in a pile of sand here in the forest behind the museum in 2016. This is a humpback whale that washed up dead near Anchorage at Kincaid Park, and was close enough to the road that we decided it would be feasible to salvage the entire skeleton. So we did that in 2016 with a crew of staff and volunteers to bring the bones up the big bluff near the Motocross Park at Kincaid Park. And then a second trip down, we hired a helicopter to sling load the big bones up the bluff to our truck and trailer. That's how we got the cranium and jaw bones, and a bunch of the other smaller bits that still had flesh on the flippers and the tail section. Were too heavy to carry up the hill on our backs. So helicopter helped immensely with that effort. Alpine Air was the helicopter company that did the sling loading. They did a great job.
Roger Topp:So that was 2016. That was 2016. The bone have been in the sand since then, and it's 2023 now, in the fall.
Aren Gunderson:Yes. So it's been six years, seven years. It's been seven years, since we buried the bones in sand, and we really--the hope was that the bones would be composting in the sand. Sand would keep the bones wet, and the natural decomposition would continue over the years. We had no idea really if that would work. We haven't composted anything before and this being Fairbanks where the ground is frozen for seven, eight months of the year, composting isn't really a great option. Yeah, I can bring a tank of water.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:For?
Aren Gunderson:Oh, there'll be in the position.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:Yeah, there's a little there's a little too much, too much flesh on here.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah. We won't get to the bones.
Kevin May:What year was that we we collected?
Aren Gunderson:2016
Kevin May:Oh 16.
Aren Gunderson:No, it's a rock.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:It's a rock. All right. I've only really looked at bird bones. They're very different
Unknown:Nice
Morgan Lynn:There you go. Ribs! This is cool. This is like a-- It's like a puzzle anatomy lesson. Scavenger hunt.
Aren Gunderson:So, it looks like a bit of a mixed bag so far. The vertebrae and ribs. are looking great. Much of the decomposition occurred on the beach where the whale washed up. And that--we did,--we waited about three months on purpose to let natural decomposition sort of release the bones from the carcass on the beach. But the bones were still really heavy with grease and oil. The vertebrae had tissue in between some of them. And they are looking very nicely cleaned. The ribs, as well, look essentially completely clean. We're not seeing a lot of oil on those. We've made it down to the layer where the flippers are. And the flippers were completely encased in flesh when, when we brought them here and they appear to be--looks like the one flipper we've discovered looks to be about half totally flush on with moderate decomp. having occurred since then it's a bit of a mess
Roger Topp:Smells good.
Aren Gunderson:Smells horrible. And it's decomposing. But it's not complete yet.
Morgan Lynn:There's another one there. Probably just need to get right down from home. Oh, cool. Something else? Did you go into the prep lab and then Jack sent you here? Did you go straight here.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:or
Aren Gunderson:So six years didn't do the job for the fully fleshed on bone.
Roger Topp:My understanding is that these bones are not fully done. They need to be macerated. You have tanks for that.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, to finish the work, we will put these in our our maceration tank. We have a huge maceration tank in our bone cleaning facility. That will--It'll take probably three batches to get all of these bones done. But yeah, we'll macerate them all so they will have all undergone the same process. Because if they'll be discolored or if you treat them differently--the bones will turn out differently in the end. So, we'll treat them all the same. They'll all get macerated, even though most of them are largely clean. We need the maceration to get inside the bone to clean out the oil that's surely still left in there, inside the vertebrae and inside the ribs. So, the bacteria in the maceration tank will take care of all the leftover grease and oil. And of course all the tissue left on the flippers....Chevrons...
Pat Druckenmiller:What, do think this is a reptile?
Kevin May:Yeah, they're haemal arches.
Aren Gunderson:Oh, there not in here. Further up.
Pat Druckenmiller:I know it's weird. It's like I don't know any other mammal groups that do.
Marissa Breslin:Oh, that have chevrons?
Mallory Gulbranson:Yeah.
Marissa Breslin:Quite a lot actually.
Unknown:Quite a lot? Really? I didn't realize that.
Marissa Breslin:Even like dogs, canines have them.
Pat Druckenmiller:Interesting.
Jess Cornelius:Do they fuse as they get older? Or do they always stay separate?
Marissa Breslin:I 've definitely seen them fused. And like some of the dogs we've gotten, but I don't know--
Mallory Gulbranson:A lot of them are fused in the dogs that we've gotten that shouldn't be fused.
Marissa Breslin:That's true.
Kevin May:What are you doing?
Aren Gunderson:I'm just I'm covering the distal end of the flipper. So--
Kevin May:So, if we were to do this in the field, we'd put a stake of some kind in there to delineate.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah. To say, Don't step on this.
Kevin May:Or just-- You're doing that to rebury it?
Aren Gunderson:No, we're not. We're not reburying it.
Kevin May:Okay. Nevermind then.
Aren Gunderson:We got thisfar. We're gonna go the distance.
Jess Cornelius:are you dealt with this? You want?
Aren Gunderson:Yeah.
Pat Druckenmiller:Golly.
Kevin May:Shucks.
Aren Gunderson:ASMR Yeah.
Mallory Gulbranson:Maybe if there's no video--
Kevin May:That would have been the maggot soup ASMR.
Aren Gunderson:That's a pretty--
Kevin May:dead whale.
Aren Gunderson:It's a pretty special texture. Use clean gloves on the second bag.
Kevin May:On the exterior?
Aren Gunderson:Yeah. So, you're gonna double back the thing there. Keep it clean on the outside.
Kevin May:It's not going in my car. My car's filthy enough as it is.
Marissa Breslin:I'm just gonna do that so it's easier to move--
Kevin May:to mix it in, to be able to grab it.
Aren Gunderson:So now what should be left is just the flippers ----which might be under me. Because the first piece of the shoulder blade came out over on this side. I need fresh gloves. The plan for today is to get the bones all out of the sand, and then we'll move them into a storage container here on site. And then starting next week, we'll start the first batch in the maceration tank
Roger Topp:Fantastic.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah.
Roger Topp:So we have a seven, eight person crew out here today.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah.
Roger Topp:Is everyone from the museum?
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, everyone touching the bones is from the museum. It is our mammals folks:Marissa Breslin, Jessica Cornelius, myself. And Kevin May, our paleontologists and Operations Manager. He helped us salvage the whale originally, off the beach. So he's helping finish the job. And then we have
folks from the ornithology lab:Symcha Gillette and Katie--
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:Caitlyn.
Aren Gunderson:Caitlyn, and some--Morgan?
Morgan Lynn:Yeah.
Aren Gunderson:Okay. And Min. Min, Morgan, Caitlyn and Symcha from the ornithology lab. Nearby lab roped into service this morning. They are here because I told them there was an opportunity to dig up a humpback whale skeleton, and they-- they seized that chance, and it will probably be the only time any of us digs up this humpback or, you know, works on a humpback whale in our careers.
Roger Topp:So this is a dig site from mammalogists, which is a rare thing. And you use sand to make it easy.
Aren Gunderson:Yes. Yep. I've never excavated a skeleton before, and we use sand to make it easy. There's the sternum. Yep.
Morgan Lynn:That's the sternum?
Aren Gunderson:That's the sternum.
Morgan Lynn:Wow, how disappointing. I mean, it's not disappointing, but why is it so small?
Kevin May:It's still smelling.
Morgan Lynn:Like a bike seat.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, that's where it gets gross.
Kevin May:Yeah, that's where the gross starts right there.
Jess Cornelius:Don't put your hand or foot right there. Where all the nasty, partially decomposed--
Roger Topp:Need a little red flag.
Jess Cornelius:Yeah, it definitely needs to be like a cordon this off.
Kevin May:Here you go buddy.
Jess Cornelius:Oh nice. Whoa.
Marissa Breslin:Wider, shorter than I thoguht it would be.
Jess Cornelius:That's a great picture.
Kevin May:Gastornus.
Morgan Lynn:Just read about gastornus.
Kevin May:Yeah, Mr. We got tracks of them from down by Anchorage.
Morgan Lynn:Is that the terror bird?
Kevin May:It's one of them.
Morgan Lynn:One of them. Cool.
Kevin May:You're probably thinking of the ones that came north from South America, but--
Morgan Lynn:I think they're flightless.
Jess Cornelius:Yeah. Oh, yeah. That size they got to be flightless.
Morgan Lynn:But they have like an insane dinosaur head. Okay.
Kevin May:Except they've got beaks and they're mostly, well, I'm sure they were all toothless.
Jess Cornelius:Yeah.
Kevin May:All the toothed birds were gone in the Cretaceous. We got birds teeth, loads of them now. Not crown birds.
Aren Gunderson:Looks like-- I mean, we've been working for, I don't know, an hour and a half. And it looks like we've got two thirds of it out.
Roger Topp:So, an afternoon's work.
Aren Gunderson:So yeah, we'll have it all out in another hour. And--
Roger Topp:The skull and the mandibles. Anything special for those?
Aren Gunderson:No. To maceration? Yeah. The macearation tank's too small for the jaw bones and the skull. So, we'll wash them with soap and water outside. And that's kind of all we can do with those.
Roger Topp:And we've done that before
Aren Gunderson:we've done that--yes. We did the same thing with the bowhead whale and It worked out well. So, we don't-- we don't have anything else we can do. We could bury them in the sand again, but I don't know if that's necessary. The skull is pretty clean. It's got some algae growing on it now, but it was clean on the beach in 2016. So, it just needs soap and water scrub. The denteries looks like they got really clean in the sandpit, so. I think there'll be fine. They might have a lot of oil in them. We'll have to wait and see if they leave a puddle in the container out here.
Kevin May:Haemal arches.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:I tried lifting it. It was kind of stuck here. Here we go. Oh!
Aren Gunderson:Oh yeah, you found the flipper.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:Yay.
Kevin May:Is it not?
Aren Gunderson:Okay. Don't. Don't step in.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:Yeah, no. You don't need to tell me twice.
Kevin May:You ain't smelled nothing.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:Hey, I've smelled--I've smelled some worse things.
Kevin May:Yeah, that's right. Maceration.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:Maceration is--nice.
Roger Topp:Paleo guys don't do adipose tissue.
Aren Gunderson:Those are separate.
Marissa Breslin:These are all separate. Yeah.
Aren Gunderson:That's really heavy. You guys can probably get
Kevin May:Stick your head in that bag. this. So we want to keep the flipper bones in place as we uncover them. So, we don't want to scoop them up and move them around with a shovel. Because we before we, we remove them from the sand, we need to number them all and get a tag on them.
Roger Topp:All look about the same, just different sides. Because when we put them in the sand, they were covered in flesh. We couldn't label the bones then. But we need to label the carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges either left and right, for the left and right flippers. And then each digit of the five digits in the whale flipper needs to be labeled as to its constituent bits so that they can be reunited, should this be articulated. You want to have all the bones in the right spot and not have to guess as to which finger bone or flipper bone goes to which side and which digit, that sort of thing?
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, yeah, so those flanges all are symmetrical in three dimensions, basically. So, since they're set in place, now we can know which is the distal and which is the anterior ends and the tops and bottoms and left and right sides for each bone, instead of throwing a whole flipper into a bin and letting the bones all fall apart.
Roger Topp:Is that complicated by the gooeyness here?
Aren Gunderson:It is.
Marissa Breslin:A bit.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, the gooeyness makes me not want to touch anything. And if we can't, if it's too gross, we can't get the bones exposed to to put a label on them. So we'll get the sand the sand, we'll get the sand cleared away and see as much as we can see. But as you can see right now, this is the tail section, there's probably 10 or 12 vertebrae at the very end of the vertebral column here in the tail, and they get progressively smaller. But it appears that there's probably like eight of them that are fully encased in a goopy mess that we don't want to deal with. Until it's cleaner.
Roger Topp:How many boots have gone into the goop so far?
Aren Gunderson:Both of mine.
Marissa Breslin:Maybe five.
Aren Gunderson:Certainly Jessica's has.
Marissa Breslin:One of mine.
Aren Gunderson:It's a smell that will almost never go away.
Roger Topp:You'll get it mid-winter.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah.
Kevin May:I had to throw my rain gear away from when we collected it in the first place.
Aren Gunderson:So, there's--the flipper is here. And we can see this one this would be a metacarpal and a carpal bone. So, there should be bones extending from here into the sand here.
Roger Topp:This is a humpback, so the flipper's much larger than the bowhead.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, but you can keep maybe you can see You can't see it because this is audio, but the bone is contained in this whale flesh paste that, yeah, is fat, decomposed fat. That's just super gross. And I think we're just going to have to do it by hand and see what we come upon. But I'm going to need thicker gloves. Or at least latex gloves on underneath on underneath these.
Roger Topp:And you though butchering a chicken, goop up you hands for the whole day.
Aren Gunderson:Right. Yeah.
Kevin May:This is cool. Just think of that all in turn to stone, we'd have to be jackhammering it out of the ground. Ew, and that wouldn't be there. That flippy floppy bit wouldn't be there. Don't don't bring the shovel back to my house, okay.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah. I'll leave it outside for a couple of years.
Kevin May:But do bring the rake back. will yah? Because I do need that, because I'm not done with the dogs yard yet.
Pat Druckenmiller:I want to see you burn the whole shovel.
Kevin May:Was the scapula on the bottom?
Marissa Breslin:Tried to do two, and it was not going well.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:A root that grew through, right in between the zip tie and the bone.
Aren Gunderson:Grab like five. Yeah, we just need one for this tail chunk. But and then did we get all the vertebrae?
Marissa Breslin:I think we got the rest--
Aren Gunderson:down to 33.
Marissa Breslin:We got 38.
Aren Gunderson:38. Okay.
Marissa Breslin:39 maybe.
Aren Gunderson:Good because there should be 52.
Kevin May:Well, how many are here? Were some missing.
Aren Gunderson:No, no, no. I don't.
Marissa Breslin:I think we got to 39 over there.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, no one no one knows where you can should publish, like, How many bones are in a humpback vertebrae? Vertebral column. There's a variation, of
Pat Druckenmiller:Funny course. But the sample size for the number of individuals that have been. Yeah, it's like, they come from like the 1800s. Wailing. Meticulous, like the reference we had for the bowhead was this guy in Japan who meticulously dissected a bowhead that whalers had harvested. And he actually measured the in-between space of each vertebrae, thoracic, lumbar and caudals and that's the reference we use to to space out the vertebrae for the bowhead. That's interesting. So, it would behoove us to do our descendants a favor and take some measurements.
Kevin May:So really have to burn it.
Pat Druckenmiller:Remind me what year--
Kevin May:We will never be able to use it again.
Pat Druckenmiller:You collected this
Kevin May:So 16
Unknown:16 Okay.
Crew:Okay, so that's probably like two vertebrae on top of each other. Hmm. Yeah, there's one here. This process is going to be under here and then that's gonna be over there. Yeah, they're kind of like crossed over.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:Yeah, that's gonna make it very helpful manner.Yeah, yep. I was like, I'll just get this one thing out. And I'm digging...
Mallory Gulbranson:The smallest bone in--at the end of the fingers.
Aren Gunderson:It's right there, as far as we know.
Mallory Gulbranson:Like, this is still kind of rectangular ish. Yeah. Okay. And then this is coming this direction here. Like the smallest bones are gonna be
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, that's like the fifth digit there. And that's the end of the thumb.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:1, 2, 3. There's something --
Aren Gunderson:Bones in there. So then there'll be two really long ones, and then there'll be another short one in there for the middle.
Mallory Gulbranson:So, this flipper is oriented with the smallest bones that way and then this is the opposite. Okay.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, so we've got--
Mallory Gulbranson:So I probably need to dig out some of this. It's gonna go a little bit further.
Aren Gunderson:Yep. And we can work our way Well, yeah, you'll have--
Mallory Gulbranson:I'm gonna remove just this top layer. I think it's gonna come at least Yeah, I'm probably in here
Marissa Breslin:That's just a layer of like a layer your tail layer.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, the tail is on top of here and then the flipper tissue. The skin is this dark gray stuff. And it looks like--
Marissa Breslin:Weird layer cake.
Aren Gunderson:Like this is the forth metacarpal right here so I've got 1,2,3, 4. And maybe there are only four.
Jess Cornelius:You know for certain three I don't know if we found four.
Aren Gunderson:There are definitely four sometimes five. So I've got the four on this side right here.
Mallory Gulbranson:I'm finding something, something like you over here.
Aren Gunderson:Careful you don't shovel the last phalanges.
Roger Topp:That's a nice marker You know where the --
Aren Gunderson:I don't know if it's a nice marker. Before we
Marissa Breslin:for what I was up pull these up, we want to score the bones with a nice
Aren Gunderson:to mark the top which up it will just they will let us put all the right face up or down.
Morgan Lynn:Wow.
Caitlyn Oliver-Brown:What is this thing? There's another rib?
Mallory Gulbranson:Yeah. Oh really missing ribs still?
Jess Cornelius:It's a mammoth task.
Mallory Gulbranson:Yeah
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, we're in our bone cleaning facility. We call it the bone lab. It's officially called the osteological preparation laboratory. So, the bone lab is where we bring skeletons to take the flesh off and make them into clean research skeletons available for loan and then they don't stink anymore and they don't have any soft tissue on them anymore. And any grease or oils inside the bones is removed, either through maceration or by--
Roger Topp:Is it the oils getting into the air that make the room smell so wonderful.
Aren Gunderson:It is the decomposition of the oils what the smell is mostly hydrogen sulfide which is like gas that's emitted during anaerobic and aerobic decomposition through bacteria. So it smells like when your compost pile gets too wet. It produces hydrogen sulfide rather than really what you want is pure methane and carbon dioxide from like, complete decomposition.
Roger Topp:Does not small, nearly as bad as people made it out to...
Aren Gunderson:No. So, it's fairly clean in here, now. I just I just drained the maceration tank a week ago to see the status of the humpback bones. They've been soaking in warm water, about 95 degree water, for four months or five months now and that should be about right for getting all the soft tissue rotted off and the oils internal to the bones digested by the bacteria. So we want to pull some of the bones out and see if they still smell see if they're greasy to the touch. And probably wash a couple, let them dry. And then that's sort of the final test to see if they still stink. When they stop stinking that means they're done and ready for archival or display. You wouldn't want to put anything on display that still smells like it's rotten.
Roger Topp:You've two maceration tanks in here. Were these put in for the bowhead project or was it sort of coincident with that project?
Aren Gunderson:It was coincident with that project. So, we, the lab, the new lab that we're in was being constructed at the time that the bowhead skeleton assembly became funded. And we needed a space then to clean the bowhead whale bones, which we didn't have so there was some urgency to acquiring this tank, which is big enough for whales. And we actually acquired this tank for the bowhead prior to the completion of this lab and we had this tank in another room to hurry the bowhead cleaning process. So, those two things were happening at the same time. But now we have this whole facility to clean large whale skeletons. The only things that won't fit in our tanks are the cranium, the big skull, and the jaw bones, which are for this humpback, they're 12 feet long. For most large whales, they're 10 to 20 feet long, the jaw bones largest bones in the animal kingdom, whale jaws.
Roger Topp:So of the humpback bones, we unearthed back in September, we're looking at, I think you said, a third of the bones in the tank right now?
Aren Gunderson:Yes, yep. So this tank is eight feet by four feet by three feet deep, and yeah, fits about a third of the humpback. And the other, the other two thirds are still out in the--outside, nearby the compost heap where we dug them up. Once this batch is done, we'll put the next third inside. Let me see if I can pull one out. Have to take our foam lid off.
Roger Topp:That's the cranium have a different whale.
Aren Gunderson:Yeah, so this is an orca that I'm moving. That came in from the National Marine Fisheries Service via the Parks Service. And it needed to be cleaned. So we threw it in with the humpback. I'm lifting a rib out. And you can smell that it doesn't really smell that bad. So, I think these are ready to be scrubbed with soap. And then the next step after that is to soak them in soapy water to allow the soap to penetrate into the bone and wash out any residual oils and the bacteria that are in there. So that'd be like a three days of soaking in warm soapy water and then pull it out again. Wash it again with scrub brushes, sponges. Rinse it clean, soak it in clean water to dissolve any soap that's left in there. Because that can discolor the bone and cause it to smell. And then pull it out of that clean water bath after a day or two. Rinse it and let it dry. And then it's clean.
Roger Topp:Giving warning signs for the facilities guys.
Aren Gunderson:For what?
Roger Topp:Intermittant whale fat.
Aren Gunderson:Just let them wonder. What we did when they demolished the bug room the old bug room. Later on, I heard that the crew found some bones and they were asking me about. I was like, I don't know. Could be some bones there. There are no plans currently to have the humpback assembled, but it will be available should such a project materialize. But we have room in our offsite storage facility, not at the museum. And this skeleton is in far better condition than the bowhead. There was a lot of discussion about the bowhead skeleton not being complete enough and bones been broken. That it really might not be feasible to complete that one. But we pulled that off with flying colors and this one we have--all the bones are-- we're missing 11 bones because they were scavenged off the beach by tourists, visitors who went and saw it. It's ribs and the hyoid, which are a set of bones that control swallowing in the throat. But those can be recreated, mirror images just as as we did with the bowhead. 3d print mirror images of other bones or there's actually a full 3d scan of a humpback whale from the Park Service down in Glacier Bay National Park. Those bones can be used to recreate the bones that are missing from this one.
Roger Topp:We've got the skull wall up in the gallery of Alaska. So maybe next thing is to do a flipper wall. A humpback flipper would be impressive.
Aren Gunderson:Yes, I plan to assemble the flipper and have it at the museum just for the collection, for tours. Hopefully it could go up in the main hallway or somewhere in the Gallery of Alaska, because it's it would be flat and mountable on the wall. And it's such an impressive part of humpbacks. They're 10 foot long flippers that are iconic to only humpback whales. And they have extra extra bones in them. They're excellent examples of homology among all tetrapods. We all mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians have the same bones in our limbs. And, it's a very good example of the evolution of limbs and the bones in them when you compare like a humpback flipper to a bat wing to a human hand to a bird wing, and an alligator forearm or a
Roger Topp:A marmot.
Aren Gunderson:Marmots. And you can see all the modifications that have happened to do various different things like swim, fly, dig, run, that sort of thing.
Roger Topp:Fantastic idea.
Aren Gunderson:Yes.
Roger Topp:Alright. Thank you Aren.
Aren Gunderson:Okay. You want digging in the background? Okay, everybody zip-it.
Roger Topp:Digging's good. Digging's good.
Aren Gunderson:Dig. Dig.
Roger Topp:Thank you to Aren Gunderson and all the museum staff and students in the museum's operations, genomics, mammals, birds, and earth sciences departments, who helped with the unearthing of the skeleton. Mallory Gulbranson, Marissa Breslin, Jess Cornelius, Symcha Gillette, Min Jang, Caitlyn Oliver-Brown, Morgan Lynn, Xochitl Munoz, and Kevin May. 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.