page_title: Beaty Biodiversity Museum
section_title: Blue Whale Exhibit
hierarchical_section_title: Beaty Biodiversity Museum / Collection / Blue Whale Exhibit
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue whale skeleton at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, British Columbia
context_page_description: The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is a natural history museum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, located on the campus of the University of British Columbia. Its 20,000 square feet of collections and exhibit space were first opened to the public on October 16, 2010; since then it has received over 35,000 visitors per year.
  Its collections include over two million specimens collected between the 1910s and the present, comprising the Cowan Tetrapod Collection, the Marine Invertebrate Collection, the Fossil Collection, the Herbarium, the Spencer Entomological Collection, and the Fish Collection. The collections focus in particular on the species of British Columbia, Yukon, and the Pacific Coast. The museum's most prominent display is a 25-metre skeleton of a female blue whale buried in Tignish, Prince Edward Island, which is suspended over the ramp leading to the main collections.
context_section_description: The museum's signature piece is its 25-metre skeleton of a female blue whale. The skeleton, housed in the museum's glass atrium, is Canada's largest blue whale skeleton, the "largest skeleton exhibit in the world suspended without external framework for support", and one of only 21 blue whale skeletons on public display worldwide. The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa began exhibiting its juvenile blue whale skeleton at around the same time.
  The process of recovering, transporting and displaying the whale was featured in a Discovery Channel documentary called Raising Big Blue, first aired in Canada on June 5, 2011. This documentary is frequently screened at the museum's theatre.
caption: A skeleton of a female blue whale at the Mowafaghian Atrium
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