It will really be a fantastic specimen when it's relocated in Hintze Hall
and becomes that central specimen.
There are so many things to see in here and the blue whale skeleton is kind of lost.
Getting close up to the bones, being able to examine them
probably in more detail than they've ever been examined before
sort of feels like the first day of school.
Even from standing down on the ground you can look up
and see that the metalwork is through the whale and around the whale
but the actual condition of that bone close-up will be something i'm really interested in looking at.
Lorraine: Dust Richard: Wow Lorraine: I know!
So you've just got this fantastic thick carpet going all the way.
What lies underneath all of that is going to tell a tale actually
and we're going to learn more about the bone.
So I really want to know how strong those bones are
because that will help to inform us about how we're going to re-hang it.
Lorraine: It's the effort to open that jaw Richard: Yeah
Lorraine: I mean, it must have been huge.
Richard: The brilliant thing about blue whale feeding is it's the single largest feeding event
of any organism at any point ever on the planet every time it happens.
The deconstruction and the rebuilding of the blue whale skeleton
is the single largest project, I think, that the museum has been involved with.
If we're going to do this, let's put dynamism into the specimen.
We should position the skeleton in a head down, lunge feeding dive.
Lorraine: It's a really ambitious project
mounting and suspending a four plus ton specimen.
This could pose some challenges.
So this is, for me, a big concern.
We've got this going into the skull and you can see it's actually broken off the side.
Richard: Yeah, it looks like the whole skull has slipped backwards on the armature towards us.
Putting it into a dive position is going to put strain and stress on the skull
Lorraine: So we've got to really make sure that we're really supporting that well
if we're changing its orientation.
At the moment it looks sometimes a bit like a lunar landscape on some of those vertebra.
It's in some ways really beautiful and in other ways i'm itching to get the hoover out.
Arianna: So the bone itself is actually quite stable.
I think overall for having hung here for 81 years it's in pretty good condition.
Once we finish the condition reporting
then we can take the next steps of actually stabilising it to come down.
Lorraine: After all the weeks that we've had in terms of dusting and condition checking,
we're going to remove the all-important first bone.
Arianna: Feels okay so far.
Lorraine: Brilliant!
Sometimes you've been planning something for so long
but when you've actually got it in the palm of your hand it's so much more real now.
Richard: This feels pretty good.
Everything gets bigger and more difficult from here.
There's no two ways about it.
Over the next few days more and more bones are going to be taken off that frame
and everybody's working really hard.
But we know that the real challenge is the skull, it's all about the skull.
Everything pivots, hinges, on the condition of this skull.
We're about to reach a critical point in the project.
There is no turning back now, absolutely no turning back.