A 119-year-old whale skeleton has made its grand return to the Hull Maritime Museum, marking a significant milestone ahead of its reopening to the public following a six-year, £20 million refurbishment.
The impressive 40-foot specimen, comprising 168 individual bones, required five days for its meticulous installation within the museum’s newly revamped Age of Sail gallery.
Conservator Nigel Larkin completed the delicate task of remounting the museum’s largest and most fragile artefact this week, after it underwent extensive cleaning and conservation work.
This particular whale was caught alongside its mother off the coast of New York in 1907.
It belongs to a species now critically endangered, with fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales believed to survive globally.
The museum is set to welcome visitors back in August.
The species faces severe threats from ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear.
When the museum reopens, visitors will be able to crawl inside the whale’s rib cage through a tunnel.
After the museum closed for refurbishment in 2020, Mr Larkin dismantled its 168 bones and transported them to his Shropshire workshop for meticulous cleaning and conservation.
Councillor Mike Ross, leader of Hull City Council, said: “This is one of the most important and fragile objects in the museum’s collection, and it’s fantastic to see it return to its rightful place.
“The whale’s story will be told in new and exciting ways, helping visitors appreciate the significance of this species.”
The North Atlantic right whale was transferred from the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge in 1935, in exchange for a blue whale skeleton from the Municipal Museum in Hull. That animal was stranded in the Humber in 1835.
Cambridge, in turn, had gained this specimen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York in exchange for a composite skeleton of a dodo in 1908.
New discoveries, meanwhile, are suggesting that archaic (non-Homo-sapiens) early human society was far more complex and advanced than previously thought.
New scientific evidence is now revealing that, some 300,000 years ago, a little-known and now long-extinct species of hominid - Homo naledi - developed what appears to have been a very complex form of communal organisation, involving extreme sex-based cultural segregation and very strong female gender identity.
The evidence strongly suggests that the species segregated dead males and females - and that potentially implies that the two sexes may well also have been socially and culturally segregated during their lives.
It suggests that the female of the species developed a form of very strong gender-based cultural identity that may, potentially in some respects, have been a form of prehistoric feminism.
Read MoreFormer NBA star Malik Beasley pleads not guilty to gambling charges
CDC urges people to prevent mosquito bites as West Nile virus season hits a strong, early start
Extraordinary heat in US Northeast arrives to clash with Fourth of July revelry
Scientists finally know how Italy’s Renaissance-era Medici brothers died
The prehistoric Irish city transforming our understanding of European history
Shocking new evidence reveals true brutality of American War of Independence
