Everything but a Gray Whale



Beaked whales.



In my quest to write about everything awesome that I encounter and eperience during my time here, I have already learned that reporting everything I'd like to is an impossible task.  Since I don't want to write in bullet points, and surely we all read enough bullet points on a daily basis already, I will not do that.  So I have decided to pick out the best of my times to describe, and last week's field study definitely qualifies as such.  The field study was for my Biology of Marine Mammals class, and we met at 8:30 am outside the Norreport train station. Now, many of my peers did not have morning field studies, or any at all, which did not make getting to bed at a decent hour the night before an easy task at all.  Regardless, I was there outside the train station at the right time, and was content to find similar bleariness in the eyes of my classmates. We caught a bus with our professor and evetually arrived at the Zoological Museum of Denmark, a mix of old world architecture fashioned with contemporary accents.  We were introduced to a head curator and then escorted into the back, past a door designated for museum personal only as we moved into the private collections.



The curator, obviosuly a friend of our professor, told us to explore and photograph the collections as much as we liked after our tour. Containing over 10 million specimens, and every species except a Gray Whale (although they have been searching high and low for one within reach),  the collections started in the 16th century, and is one of the five biggest in the world.  I spent the next two hours with the class as our professor took us through the thousands of whale, dolphin, porpoise, seal, sea lion, walrus, dugong and polar bear skeletal archives. It was incredible to see these things. The fact that each specimen, whether dated 1750 or 2005 was at one point living and breathing is mind boggling.  Eventually we were taken into the "whale basement", where they kept all the larger cetacean specimens.  We saw blue whale jaws and baleen pieces the size of SUV vehicles, and walked along the bus like spinal structure of each creature. To think that such dinosar like creatures still navigate the seas today is exciting.  Just as eye-opening to consider is that each of these large whales is over 60% reduced in world population size than 100 years ago due to consumption by man. 

In the whale basement, looking at the blue whales.

After our tour, we were given free reign to explore the three floors of private collections ourselves.  I saw everything from stuffed gorillas and rhinos, to thousands of preserved jarred reptilians. The biodiversity of this world is staggering, how such a vast array arose from single celled life is almost incomprehensible.  Of course, such incomprehensibility is why I go to school.

The specimens on the table had been acquired most recentely, and were still being labeled and organized.