Page 231 - The Secret Museum

ride from the museum building in Edinburgh. The Centre is made up of about 15

buildings, that store around 8 million artefacts and specimens that don’t fit into the
various big museums in Edinburgh.

The blue whale lives inside one of the biggest warehouses. The bones are painted
grey and they lie, in order, along the length of a shelf that runs across the inside of the
warehouse.

It was interesting that it has become such an intrinsic part of the museum that the
curators had forgotten its history. They thought Knox had something to do with it, and
thought maybe that he prepared the skeleton on The Meadows, the big park in the
centre of Edinburgh, and the taxidermist I met on site wondered whether Jawbone

Walk in The Meadows was named after the scene. But when I asked to write about
the whale they kindly dug up its story from a nearly two-century-old tome, in the
library, written by Knox. This is the story I have told here. It turns out that Jawbone
Walk in The Meadows has nothing to do with the blue whale. There are two pairs of
jaws on the Meadows today; one of them once decorated a stand of the Faroe Islands
at an International Exhibition held in 1886.

The blue whale bones will stay here for the foreseeable future, kept company by a
hippo on the floor beside it, lots of whale skeletons and two sperm whale skeletons.

One sperm whale skull used to be on show. In those days children threw coins inside
it, so there are coins in the collection now that came from the sperm whale.

Most whales that come into the collection nowadays have been found stranded on
a Scottish beach. The museum preparators use biological washing powder to clean
the bones ready for storage or display. This is what happened to the bones of the
Thames whale. Do you remember the sight of that poor whale, on the news, and in the
papers – a big bottlenose whale stranded in the heart of London, just outside the
Houses of Parliament in 2006? Damon Albarn, the lead singer of Gorillaz and Blur

wrote a song about her called ‘Northern Whale’. He said it ‘started off as a love song
for someone I love and then a whale came up the Thames … and it turned into a song
about a whale’. It’s a sad song, for a sad tale of a poor whale. After attempts to
rescue it came to nothing, its skeleton was preserved and cleaned up in the National
Museums Collections Centre.

Sometimes natural history museums use tiny employees – thousands of beetles – to
clean new specimens. They place new arrivals into an incubator full of beetles that
crawl all over the body of the specimen and eat and eat until all that is left are bones,

but the National Museum of Scotland don’t keep the beetles as they’re too high
maintenance. If one escaped it would gobble up lots of the collection and they don’t
want to have to deal with that.

Further into the warehouse I saw a bubble wrapped Indian elephant – the African
one wouldn’t fit through the door of the museum when it was renovated, and so it is
still part of the displays. I also saw a new aardvark being prepared for display by the
museum’s taxidermist and looked at dinosaur footprints in crates, lots of armour,