Photos by Richard Quinn / Special to The Star Paul Collins, left, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and Mike Fontes, a manager with Adobe Co. of Ventura, prepare to lift the skull of a blue whale.

Video: Whale washes ashore

The corpse of a large Blue whale reported to be floating in local waters for several days washes up at a local beach.
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Amelia McCauley, 4, foreground, and her sister, Noel McCauley, 8, both of Camarillo, watch the burial of the pungent remains of the leviathan Sunday.

The 140,000-pound blue whale is buried. The campers and the curious have moved on to other fascinations. And the mammal's massive skull may one day be on display at a Santa Barbara museum.

The story began Thursday when the whale, apparently killed in a collision with a ship, washed ashore near Hobson County Park, northwest of Ventura. On Saturday, as hundreds of onlookers watched, the 72-foot-long whale was towed to a stretch of beach at Faria County Park.

There, heavy machinery was used to dig graves about 10 feet deep. Because the whale was so massive and could have conceivably been dragged back to sea by the tide, it was cut and buried in pieces with large boulders used as anchors against the tide.

On Sunday morning, as the yellow excavator machines carried the last sections of whale to the graves, the beach was strewn with huge slabs of bone, including the cranium and the jaw.

Parts of the skeleton were apparently damaged by the fatal collision with the ship, but pieces of the whale's skull were loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken to the Channel Islands Marine and Wildlife Institute outside of Santa Barbara.

The bones will be cleaned and oil removed from them in a painstaking process that could take many months.

Though the exact plan is still being calculated, officials at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History hope to eventually have the skull on display. It could be cast as a replacement part for the museum's current blue whale skeleton.

Scientists also took tissue samples and conducted a postmortem exam known as a necropsy.

"The real message is that this is a learning opportunity for everyone," said museum spokeswoman Easter Moorman, noting the whale attracted home-school classes and high school students.

Ann Moore, an English teacher from Denver, heard about the whale from a waitress and was disappointed to discover Sunday morning most of the mammal had already been buried. But others who had watched the whale throughout the weekend were there to fill in details on its size — as big as a semi or maybe a small plane — and on their emotions.

"It's kind of sad," said Michael Davis of Moorpark. "There's so few of them around."