When plans were submitted for a wind farm in the field outside Falmouth where the head was buried, Prof McDonald started to look at how best to retrieve it.<\/p>\n
However, he got a new job out of Cornwall before being able to do it, leaving the university with a two-tonne whale’s head under its premises, and nobody obvious to deal with it.<\/p>\n
Stuart Bearhop does not know much about digging up whales, and he is not a whale biologist but the job of excavating it had to fall to someone, and the university decided it would be him – probably because he had been the one who started asking questions, on my behalf. <\/p>\n
Left too long in the ground the bones would start to break down.<\/p>\n
To help with the sizeable task was Paul White, a former Royal Marine who usually works excavating live electricity cables and utilities. <\/p>\n
Also on hand were Johnny Nicolas, who lays slabbing for housing developments, and David Hatton who is a digger master. <\/p>\n
They had with them a vacuum excavator usually used for working around live electricity cables and gas pipes. <\/p>\n
A huge lorry would suck up all the soil from around the skull, making it easier to then be winched out on a digger arm. <\/p>\n
Over the course of the next 10 hours I watched as the team, with great care and precision, painstakingly extracted the whale’s head from its resting place. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When plans were submitted for a wind farm in the field outside Falmouth where the head was buried,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-341348","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}