Page 229 - The Secret Museum

THESE MAGNIFICENT CREATURES ARE SO big that even as newborns they weigh the

same as an elephant.

This mighty blue whale beached up in Dunbar, on the coast of Scotland, on 5
October 1831. Locals thought it was a shipwreck. Some fishermen went for a good
look, realized what it was and towed it to North Berwick harbour where they secured
it in place with an anchor. When the tide went out the whale was left dry on the sandy
beach.

A local doctor, Frederick John Knox, bought the whale to study it and learn about
blue whales. His older brother, Robert Knox, was a fellow of the Royal College of
Surgeons in Edinburgh. He got into trouble for buying bodies sold by Burke and Hare

because it turned out they were the bodies of people who had been murdered. This
scandal was in 1827–28, when Frederick John Knox was curator of his brother’s
anatomical museum but nobody was convicted so they carried on with their careers.
Eventually Dr Frederick John Knox emigrated to New Zealand. But not before he fell
in love with the blue whale.

The gigantic animal that now belonged to Knox weighed 200 tons. He couldn’t
study it on the beach, and he couldn’t move it so what on Earth could he do with it?
He began by offering the blubber to locals as manure. People arrived with carts and

horses to help themselves to supplies every day for a week until Knox was left with
just the bones (weighing 28 tons), the tongue (the size of half an Asian male
elephant), and whalebone, or baleen (whales have no teeth but have evolved baleen
to filter out small animals from sea water).

Knox was amazed by the baleen, having not seen anything like it before. It is quite
strange stuff: whales eat by diving down to around 200 metres, then ‘lunge’ several
times, dropping their jaw, and swimming at around 11 kilometres per hour. The
whales take a gulp of water, including any animals, like small fish, or krill, that are

swimming around in the water. Then they partly close their mouth, and push out their
tongue, so that the baleen sieves out the small fish, leaving them with clear water to
swallow. The krill slips through the baleen though, and blue whales eat three tons of
it a day during summer. They eat very little the rest of the year.

They can swallow nothing larger than a grapefruit. Knox described how
disappointed the people on the beach were by the size of the giant creatures ‘gullet’,
for it could only admit ‘a man’s closed hand’. This ‘seemed to give universal
dissatisfaction, and lowered the whale in the estimation of the mob at least fifty per

cent’. The aorta however was over 90 centimetres in circumference, big enough for a
toddler to crawl along.

Baleen is made from keratin (the same protein that hair, horn and nails are made
of) and was used to make whalebone corsets. You might think that corsets were made
from whale’s bones, but no. Thousands of Victorian ladies enveloped their bodies in
what whales have instead of teeth.