October 5, 2014 — There’s nothing quite like the smell of rotting whale flesh to make sure your olfactory senses are working properly.
A group of volunteers excavating the remains of a whale Saturday worked in muddy, smelly conditions on Mowry Beach in Lubec and planned to resume their efforts on Sunday.
The group, mostly college students, was digging up the bones of a 54-foot finback whale that was stranded on the beach in 1994 and buried at the site. Organizers of the project want to recover the bones, clean them and reassemble the skeleton to display it in Lubec.
The group “probably will not finish” its work this weekend, according to Rhonda Welcome, one of the organizers of the effort. She added that the leaders behind the effort will “regroup and talk.”
Rosemary Seton, a research associate and marine mammal stranding coordinator with the College of the Atlantic’s marine mammal research group, Allied Whale, and Gayle Kraus, a professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine at Machias, were overseeing the work.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News