It has been several months since my last post looking at blue whale on the move but finally the long process of cleaning and conserving each individual bone has been successfully completed and the conservators are now just embarking on surface scanning the bones in high definition. Conservation can be an extremely slow process but it is worth the time and effort. During the past 9 months the team have cleaned and conserved over 220 individual bones. This equates to over 110m2 of whale bone surface area.
During this time we also planned the final position and articulation of the whale for its suspension in Hintze Hall so the armature design could commence. This post outlines the conservation treatment and articulation planning phase of this project.