What goes on behind the scenes at a natural history museum? What do you do with all the specimens that don’t quite fit in the museum’s building? This entertaining short video from KPCC takes a look at “The Whale Warehouse”, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles’ overflow storage facility.
There are some interesting parallels between museums and libraries, although your storage problems differ a bit when you’re dealing with shelving an oversized book versus shelving a whale skull that has continued to leak oil for over 25 years.
Discussion
4 Thoughts on "The Whale Warehouse"
For fans of whale skeletons, ‘Sightlines’, a book of essays by the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, contains a great piece on her visit to the Whale Hall of the Bergen Natural History Museum during its renovation.
The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum solved this problem by opening an annex (The Udvar-Hazy Center) at Dulles Airport. If you have not been there, it is worth the trip. The highlights are a blackbird, the Enola Gay, a Concorde and of course the Discovery space shuttle.
See also the YouTube channel “BrainScoop,” from Emily Grasslie, the “chief curiousity correspondent” for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.