A Whale at the Edge of the Sea: Dalian’s Natural-History Collections

A whale can overwhelm a room, but scale is only the beginning of its story. In its 2023 account of Dalian Natural History Museum, People’s Daily Overseas Edition describes a 17.1-metre female North Pacific right whale prepared as a skin mount.

Such a mount preserves the animal’s external form. The broad body and shape of the head remain visible, giving the whale a different presence from a skeleton displayed for its bones. Preparation turns a collected animal into an object that can be studied long after its death.

The North Pacific right whale, Eubalaena japonica, is a baleen whale. Instead of teeth used to seize prey, baleen plates help filter small planktonic animals from the water. Its strongly arched jaw and absence of a dorsal fin are useful features for understanding its form.

The feeding system also unsettles a simple equation between body size and prey size. An enormous mammal can depend on concentrations of very small animals. That relationship connects anatomy to habitat: the shape of a mouth belongs to a way of feeding, and that way of feeding depends on conditions beyond the animal’s body. A specimen can introduce this ecological relationship even though it cannot reproduce the movement, sound or behaviour of a living whale.

The museum occupies a seaside site at Heishijiao and moved into its present building in 1998. Its scope is broader than local marine animals: geological material, plants and fossils from western Liaoning belong to the institution’s account of the natural world. The collection is therefore not a simple census of creatures that can be seen in the water immediately outside.

Objects have reached the museum through collecting, research and donations. Their places of origin extend the collection’s geography well beyond the water outside its windows.

NOAA identifies the North Pacific right whale as endangered. Commercial whaling severely depleted its populations, while entanglement and vessel strikes remain threats. These are questions about living animals and the seas they use, beyond the preservation of any one specimen.

Preserving a whale specimen keeps one body available for study. Protecting living whales depends on conditions across their feeding grounds and migration routes. The museum’s collection brings the anatomy of an individual into view; conservation carries the story back into the sea.