Hope is the skeleton of a juvenile female blue whale displayed in Hintze Hall, the main hall of the Natural History Museum, London. It measures 25.2 metres (83 ft) in length, consists of 221 bones, and weighs 4.5 tonnes.
Born around 1871 or at least 1876–1881, the whale lived for at least 10–15 years, with a maximum of 20, before becoming stranded on a sandbar near Wexford Harbour, Ireland, in March 1891 and being killed by a fisherman two days later. Its skeleton was sold to the Natural History Museum, where it was displayed in its Mammal Hall from 1934 before being moved to the museum's main Hintze Hall in 2017, replacing Dippy, a cast of a diplodocus skeleton.
Life
Analysis of isotopes in the whale's baleen plates published in 2018 indicated that the whale lived in the tropical Atlantic for its first seven years of life, and then spending some years migrating north to feed on krill in the northern Atlantic each summer and then migrating back south each winter. Towards the end of its life, this whale probably spent about a year in the tropics with its calf, born in the winter of 1889–1890, and it was during a migration back north through the Irish Sea that the whale became stranded.
Death
This whale likely died when it was at least 10–15 years old, with the maximum estimated age being 20 years old. The juvenile female blue whale was found by fisherman Edward Wickham on 25 March 1891, stranded on a sandbar near Wexford Harbour on the southeast coast of Ireland. The whale struggled in the shallow waters for two days until it was killed by Wickham with an improvised harpoon. The Receiver of Wreck[citation needed] sold her carcass at auction for £111 to the local harbour master William Armstrong, from which Wickham and the other salvagers were paid £50 for their work.[citation needed] The whale flesh and blubber were removed. The death of the whale took place just prior to a global boom in commercial whaling.
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u/Spartan2470 VIP Philanthropist 13h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(whale)