Museum of whale skeletons consumed by B.C. fire [Video]

It takes years to rebuild a whale.

Just ask Jim Borrowman, co-founder of the Whale Interpretive Centre museum that housed numerous whale skeletons on the boardwalk of Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island.

“When we find a dead whale somewhere, especially a larger one, it’s a massive job to take that animal from a whole, complete dead whale, to get it to its point where all the bones are cleaned and re-articulated and then hung up,” said Borrowman.

In the case of Finny, a 20-metre fin whale that died in a 1999 ship strike, the body had to be towed by tugboat from Vancouver hundreds of kilometres away to a beach near Telegraph Cove.

The huge body was dragged ashore and defleshed, painstakingly cleaned and the bones then sunk in clean waters, degreased of their oils, then dried, in a process that took four years.

Finally came the two-year project of rearticulating, or reconnecting, the skeleton and hanging …