A roughly 70-foot blue whale skeleton now stands in the courtyard of the Gladys Valley Marine Studies Building at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. It went up in May 2026 and was dedicated in July. It is one of only a handful on public display in North America and the only one between Vancouver and San Francisco Bay.
Getting it there took ten years, and the hardest chapter of it happened on the floor of Yaquina Bay, where a dive team from the Oregon Coast Aquarium rigged the whale to the bottom in 2016 and left it for the crabs.
Why sink a whale?
The animal was struck by a ship and washed ashore in Curry County in the fall of 2015. Crews spent days on the beach stripping some 58 tons of flesh off 365 bones. What was left was still not clean, and it was too big to make clean by hand.
The scale is the problem. A blue whale’s lower jaw runs 18 feet, about the length of a parking space. This one’s skull weighed 6,500 pounds, more than a full-size pickup truck.
The first plan was burial. Bruce Mate of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute asked Jim Lewis, who ran facilities at Hatfield, about digging a pit in the yard.
“We don’t need the sand,” Lewis said. “We need the ocean critters to do the work.”
So the plan became the bay. Sink the skeleton in Yaquina Bay and let the scavengers on the bottom pick it clean. They would strip the bones more thoroughly than any crew with knives, and for free. All it required was someone willing to rig several tons of whale to the seafloor, in the dark if it came to that.
Who said yes
In November 2015 Lewis brought the problem to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, along with Bob Cowen, then Hatfield’s director, and Mate. The Aquarium’s dive team had worked with Hatfield before. Director of Animal Care Jim Burke said yes and handed the job to Jenna Clos, then the Aquarium’s dive safety officer and now its chief operating officer.
The team looked at the scope of the work and took it on at no charge.
Planning started that same month. They surveyed a shallow, protected stretch on the south side of the OSU pier, staked out a site 25 feet square and marked it with buoys, then replaced the stakes with permanent ones in January. Visibility on the bottom could drop to zero on any tide, so they kept diving the site through the spring, running rescue and search drills until they could work it blind. Delays getting the bones north pushed the operation to April 28, 2016.
The day they sank the whale
Four divers did all the underwater work: Jenna Clos, Doug Batson, and Aquarists Kevin Clifford and Mark Murray. Jim Burke ran the topside operation with the lift director and drove the Aquarium’s research vessel, the Gracie Lynn, keeping the boat upwind of the dock where the whale was staged.
They started with the mooring. The crane set four 800-pound anchors at the corners of the site and a fifth in the center. Divers linked them with three-inch chain around the outside, then laid a second chain in an X through the middle, which gave them a grid to tie bones to. They moused every shackle, meaning they wired each pin shut so it could not vibrate loose over three winters of storms.
Then the bones came down. Mate’s team had divided the skeleton into 17 bundles, each wrapped in heavy fishing net like a burrito. The crane lowered them one at a time. Once there was slack in the line, divers descended, unclipped the safety latch, swam the bundle into position, shackled it down, then surfaced and signaled for the next lift. After a few rounds they found a shortcut: send the signal up the moment the latch came off, so the crane could stage the next bundle while the divers were still working below.
The crane crew put the bundles almost exactly where the divers wanted them, and the water was the clearest the team had ever seen there.
“The real work was done in the water,” said Lewis, who ran the crane side from the dock. “What made this unique is the dive team rigging in a very complicated location, with the large changes in tides. The divers are controlling the crane operators from underwater.”
That went on for eight or nine hours.
The skull would not stay down
Even stripped, the skull wanted to float. They added 800 pounds of weight and it still lifted off the bottom. Another 800 was not enough. It took 2,400 pounds before it stayed put.
One bundle split its seams underwater. Clos and Batson re-rigged it on the bottom so the crane could lift it back to the pier, with the topside crew testing the load in stages first. Afterward the team joked that underwater basket weaving had finally paid off.
They had budgeted two days. They finished in one.
Three years down, then up
The dive team went back quarterly for three years to inspect the site. By 2019 sand had buried much of the skeleton. Lewis says getting the bones out was less complicated than putting them in, as long as they had good weather and the right tide.
Below the surface it was still grim. Divers dug the site out with an airlift, a suction tube that vacuums sediment off the bottom, until the shackles showed, then floated each bundle up with lift bags. Clos, Clifford, Batson, and Senior Aquarists Sage Butts and Trevor Ermann staged all 17 packages on the bottom before the crane arrived.
“Although we were relatively shallow, the water was dark and murky, and even with dive lights we could only see a few feet,” Batson said. “Once we started manipulating the bags of bones, that stirred up the mud and reduced visibility further. The bay water is cold, so our team wore drysuits to stay insulated and warm.”
Every bundle came back up. The bay had done the job.
What it cost, and what it did not
The bones spent a year drying in a local warehouse, then went to Dinosaur Valley Studios in Alberta for restoration. Seven years after they left the bay, they went up at Hatfield.
The Oregon Coast Aquarium never sent a bill.
“When all was said and done,” Lewis said, “this would have cost over $40,000 that the Aquarium donated to this project.”
“To have been asked and trusted by the Marine Mammal Institute to complete this specialized work was humbling,” Clos said.
Where to see it
The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) skeleton is a quarter mile from the Oregon Coast Aquarium, in the Gladys Valley courtyard at the Hatfield Marine Science Center. The courtyard is open dawn to dusk.
Walk the rail and find the lower jaw, the long pale beam running out past the skull. That is 18 feet of bone that spent three winters on the floor of Yaquina Bay, and four people put it down there by hand.
More from this stretch of coast: a fishing vessel joined a trained team to free an injured humpback whale off Newport.
