Funded by HHMI's Precollege Science Education Program, which supports innovative efforts to enhance K-12 science education and science literacy, the project afforded the Alaskan high school students a rare opportunity. Students worked closely with museum staff, teachers and experts in the community. The whale's carcass had been found beached on an island south of Homer in 1988. The students' challenge was to make it whole again, and to document every step by diligently weighing, measuring and drawing each bone. As she carefully reconstructed one of the whale's flippers, molding some of its missing finger bones from modeling clay, Seaton began to consider seriously a career in research paleontology, specializing in vertebrates.
Bones are a puzzle.
I like to try to see how they fit together, and how they affect different kinds of movement. Seaton also measured the whale's skull, a painstaking task because she could not find in a modern scientific dictionary some of the terms researchers earlier in the century had used to describe certain skull bones or portions of the skull. After completing the measurements, she clearly labeled a drawing so that other scientists would know exactly what she had done. That project sparked her interest in scientific illustration. Working with photographs and measurement grids, Seaton practiced drawing bones borrowed from the Pratt Museum.