Mammologists at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto have unveiled a preserved blue whale heart.

Weighing in at 600 pounds, roughly the size of a small pony, the heart went on display on Thursday.

The team says it's the first heart of the marine mammal to ever be preserved fully and could help it last for as long as 1,000 years.

A massive 600-pound blue whale heart, the first-ever to be preserved, was unveiled at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada on Thursday (pictured)

Without the heart's blood and supporting structures, the organ weighs around 400 pounds. The extra pounds came from the steel mesh scientists put inside to keep the ventricles and the thinner blood vessels from collapsing (the heart in Guben, Germany in May 2017)

In 2014, nine blue whales died in Canada's Newfoundland when they became trapped in ice - an astonishing three percent of the wild population.

When these 300,000-pound creatures die, they almost always sink. But in a rare event, two washed up on the shores of Trout River in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Scientists were then able to salvage some of the whale's organs to conduct never-before-done research.

The plastinated, or preserved, heart is 'a thing of beauty', said Jacqueline Miller, a mammalogy technician from the ROM, who has been working with the whale since it was first discovered.

'It's quite a bit smaller than we were expecting.'

Miller admitted that she and her colleagues expected to pull out a heart relative to the size of a sedan, reported Motherboard.

However, it is rather the size of a small pony, measuring five feet by four feet by four feet - and could pump 58 gallons of blood per second.

Without the heart's blood and supporting structures, it weighs around 400 pounds.

However, Miller said the extra 200 pounds came after the team put steel mesh inside to keep the ventricles and the thinner blood vessels from collapsing.

A human heart is shown for size comparison in front of the plastinated whale heart, which is approximately the 'size of a small pony' (in Guben, Germany in May 2017)

Before it was displayed in Toronto, the heart traveled from Canada to Germany, where technicians worked on it for more than a year as no facility in North America was big enough to handle a whale heart (pictured in Guben, Germany in May 2017)

The heart was unveiled next to the skeleton of the massive blue whale it came from.

However, there were concerns about potential damage that could be caused because the organ had to be unwrapped from a box and lifted onto a platform, but no damage occurred.

Blue whales have the largest hearts of all animals and this organ represents the maximum size a heart can be to continue supporting a living creature, according to Miller.

Before it was displayed in Toronto, the heart traveled from Canada to Germany, where technicians worked on it for more than a year as no facility in North America was big enough to handle a whale heart.

Because of the massive size, no one was sure how long the plastination process would take.

The heart came from a blue whale that, in a rare incident, washed up on the shores of Trout River in the province Newfoundland and Labrador in 2014

First, scientists had to remove all the water from of the tissue, down to the cellular level. They did this by placing the heart in an acetone bath, the same chemical used in nail polish remover.

Next, they had to put it in a synthetic plastic, or polymer, bath.

Lastly, scientists put the whole tank of polymer in a vacuum chamber so that the existing acetone would bubble and boil away.

'Fat is very hard to plastinate,' explained Miller.

The heart remained in this vacuum for more than four months. Miller referred to the heart as 'Frankenheart' and compared the unveiling to the birth of a child because of how long the team worked on it.

'We're very, very proud,' she said, adding that the preserved heart could last for as long as 1,000 years.