In the spring of 2014, unusually heavy sea ice clogged the waters off Newfoundland, and nine blue whales became trapped and died. The ice entrapment was a natural event, but its scale was staggering: the loss of nine animals in a single season amounted to roughly three percent of the Northwest Atlantic blue whale population, an already endangered species. The whales were long dead by the time they washed up, and most of them sank, as blue whales usually do. Two did not. Their carcasses drifted to shore, one at Trout River and one at Rocky Harbour, and the world noticed.
What made the Trout River whale famous was, at first, a kind of grim spectacle. The carcass had bloated with methane gas until it looked like a grotesque balloon, and photographs of the inflated animal traveled the globe, with news outlets from the BBC to CNN openly wondering whether it might explode. The town of Trout River had a dead whale on its beach, a smell that residents described as gut-wrenching, and no obvious way to deal with either.
Mark Engstrom, then the Royal Ontario Museum's senior curator of mammals and deputy director of collections and research, had spent years wanting to mount an exhibition on Canada's large whales. The blue whale, the biggest of them all, had always eluded him. When he got a phone call from a contact at Fisheries and Oceans Canada telling him that two blue whales had washed up in Newfoundland, he moved quickly. Here was a tragedy, he thought, that might yield something worthwhile. "I didn't want this animal to be unceremoniously dumped in the landfill," he later told Canadian Geographic.
Getting the whale off the beach was its own saga. The Trout River whale was towed by trawler to the nearby community of Woody Point. A small ROM team, working with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Research Casting International, and local residents, then did something that had rarely been attempted: they flensed a blue whale much the way sailors on a whaling ship once would have, stripping blubber and flesh and disarticulating the skeleton bone by bone. They worked through hail and cold, harassed by marauding seagulls, collecting tissue samples and DNA along with the bones. Engstrom described the animal as absolutely gigantic and said he was awed by its physical size. He also noted, with some wonder, that he could put his head inside one of its blood vessels.
The whale, a female, was eventually given a name: Blue. Her bones, carefully tagged and documented, were loaded onto trucks and driven to Ontario, along with the skeleton and tissues of the second whale. To clean the bones, the museum buried them for a year and a half in a compost of manure and sawdust, a low-tech but effective way to strip away remaining flesh and draw oil out of the bone. Then the skeleton was mounted, fully articulated, at 80 feet long, one of the largest and most complete displays of its kind in the world.
The heart took a stranger journey. Blue whales have the largest hearts in the animal kingdom, and this one weighed close to 400 pounds. In the spring of 2017 the ROM received it from Guben, Brandenburg, Germany, where it had undergone plastination. There, technicians pumped the organ with formaldehyde to halt decomposition, then soaked it in acetone for more than six months until the acetone had replaced all the water in the tissue. The heart was then placed in a silicone polymer solution inside a vacuum chamber, where near-outer-space pressure boiled the acetone away and drew the polymer into every cell. The result, installed in Toronto in May 2017 by experts from Research Casting International, is the first and only real preserved blue whale heart in the world. Jacqueline Miller, the mammalogy technician who helped lead the project from acquisition to installation, noted that once its great vessels are accounted for, the heart stands about six and a half feet tall and is large enough, when dilated, to squeeze into a Smart car.
The exhibition that grew out of all this, Out of the Depths: The Blue Whale Story, opened at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2017, timed in part to mark Canada's sesquicentennial. It was built around Blue's skeleton and the preserved heart, and it folded in the broader science the recovery made possible: what blue whales eat and how they feed, how they communicate, how they evolved from a four-legged, wolf-sized land mammal called Pakicetus into the largest animal that has ever lived, and how commercial whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries drove them to the brink before conservation and science began, slowly, to bring them back. The ROM's researchers have continued to study the whales' DNA, work that has since turned up surprises, including evidence of a small amount of fin whale ancestry in blue whale genetics.
The exhibition has since been refashioned as a traveling show, circulated by the ROM under the title The Blue Whale Story, and it is that version that comes to St. Louis. At the Saint Louis Science Center, visitors will encounter a life-sized replica of Blue's skeleton, the full-scale heart model, a walk-in model of a blue whale's jaw for photos and a lesson in how the animals feed, a Whale Sound Chamber where surround-sound recordings let guests compare whale calls, and a game called License to Krill in which players dodge obstacles and dive deep to eat. There is also a visual walk through whale evolution, from that land-dwelling ancestor to the modern ocean giant, and an account of the species' decline under commercial whaling and its halting recovery.
The exhibition runs at the Science Center from May 23, 2026, through January 10, 2027, on the first floor of the main building, with timed entry every 15 minutes. It is a paid experience, with adult tickets at $16 and discounts for members, seniors, and children. The Science Center frames it as a chance to stand alongside an ocean giant without leaving the Gateway City.
What visitors will be looking at, though, is not just a specimen. Blue is the physical record of a bad spring in the waters off Newfoundland, of a bloated carcass that became an international punchline before it became a research subject, and of a small town's decision to let scientists take an animal that had died on its shore and make something of it. Engstrom's hope, expressed at the time, was that the whales' deaths would not be wasted. More than a decade on, the skeleton he salvaged is still teaching people what a blue whale is, and what it took to lose nine of them at once.