Beaty Biodiversity Museum
Suspended blue whale skeleton anchors a glass atrium above natural history collections spanning two million specimens.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver traces a blue whale that washed ashore dead on Prince Edward Island in 1987, her skeleton damaged by what looked like a ship strike. Buried in red dirt near Nail Pond, she was forgotten for two decades until a University of British Columbia team went digging in 2007. A bigger crew returned the next spring with shovels and pickaxes to peel away twenty years of skin, blubber and oil, bone by bone, before packing her into a refrigerated rail container bound for Vancouver.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Vancouver Aquarium
Waterfront aquarium in a forested park, home to marine research, rescue work, and thousands of aquatic species.
Engine 374 Pavilion
Restored eighteen eighty-six steam locomotive that hauled the first transcontinental train into the city, displayed in a glass pavilion.
Museum of Anthropology at UBC
Concrete and glass museum of Northwest Coast Indigenous art, crowned by a monumental cedar creation-myth carving.
Vancouver Maritime Museum
Wooden RCMP Arctic schooner that beat the Northwest Passage twice, dry-docked for boarding tours.