The bones were bound for a warehouse in Trenton, the headquarters of Research Casting International. RCI, founded in 1987 by Peter May, is a museum technical services company: it casts, mounts, fabricates and transports exhibits for museums around the world. Their 50,000-square-foot warehouse is filled with casts of dinosaurs, machinery large and small, and science texts; classic rock is almost always playing in the background. Staff from RCI had helped dismantle the carcass in Newfoundland, and now the company was charged with preparing the skeleton for display — a challenge that relied on some unusual preparation methods.

In October, RCI staff buried all the bones of both whales — the Trout River and the Rocky Harbour animals — in shipping containers filled with manure.

It took 385 of Prince Edward County’s finest dairy cows to produce enough manure for the task: eight triaxle dump truck loads. Bacteria in the manure would devour much of the organic matter remaining on the bones, saving humans the work. (The aerobic process would also require lots of oxygen and create lots of heat, so staff cut vents in the shipping containers.)

A year after the recovery in Newfoundland, a team of scientists and technicians met in Trenton and began to thaw a 180 kilogram organ: the Rocky Harbour whale’s heart. The organs of that whale were much better preserved, maybe because it had been submerged in frigid water for longer. ROM staff have also had greater success recovering high-quality DNA from this whale.

The whale’s heart is almost the size of a smart car, and the ROM decided to plastinate it for the exhibit. After the heart was slowly defrosted over the course of five days, the team, including two U.S. large mammal veterinarians, worked quickly to prepare the organ before it started to rot. They plugged the heart’s valves with “buckets, bottles, whatever fits. There's a toilet plunger in one of them,” Jacqueline Miller, a ROM mammalogy technician, told me at the time. It wasn’t easy to find all the openings: whale heart anatomy is very different from ours. “It’s wider than tall, and flatter front to back, and symmetrical,” Miller says.

Once the heart was as tightly sealed as possible, they connected hoses to it and pumped it full of a formaldehyde solution, which arrests decomposition and stiffens the normally elastic muscle. Once fixed and shaped, the heart was shipped to a company in Germany that created the famous Body Worlds exhibits.

In Germany, the heart spent months in a bath of acetone, dehydrating it. That emptied the cells of water, so they could be filled with polymer. The heart sat in a vat of silicone in a vacuum chamber for five months, slowly being impregnated with the plastic.

Soon the polymer will be cured, hardening the heart so it can be displayed. The ROM expects to add the heart to the exhibit this summer.

Between May and August of last year, the staff at RCI loaded the whale bones into two pools that the company bought and assembled inside their warehouse. They were real swimming pools designed to sit above ground in backyards; they were even lined with decorative mosaic tiles. A tarp was set up over the pools. Inside, the bones rested on a platform. A vapour degreaser continually circulated environmentally friendly detergents inside the tent, kind of like a dishwasher. This slow process was meant to leach any remaining oil from the bones.

The swimming pools were also used to prepare the whale’s baleen. Over many months, the sheets of baleen had dried and curled, developing white cuticle-like substance. So first they were power-washed, and then rehydrated in the pools. Once the sheets regained their flexibility, they were pressed and flattened between sheets of plywood. Finally, the bristles were groomed — to make them glossy, staff used a product designed for horses, Cowboy Magic Super Bodyshine.