Forty-one years ago, one of the biggest creatures on earth beached and died in a mangrove forest on the Northern Territory coast north-east of Darwin.
The blue whale was more than 25-metres long and probably weighed more than 136,000 kilograms.
A blue whale can grow to more than 30m in length and its calves are the biggest babies on earth.
An average blue whale eats around 40 million krill a day during their summer feeding season.
For several years the massive carcass lay hidden and rotting in the mangroves at Cape Hotham, near the mouth of the Adelaide River, 67 kilometres from Darwin.
It is not known who discovered it.
But over the next few years people started removing parts of the vertebrae and taking them home, probably unaware how rare blue whales are on earth.
Listed as an endangered species, environmental groups say there could be as few as between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales left in the sea.
The sighting of a blue whale off the coast of Sydney in 2020 stoked the excitement of whale watchers.
The animal that beached in the NT in 1980 — officially it is called a Balaenoptera musculus — was the first to be recorded in the NT.
Jared Archibald, the curator of the Museum and Art Galley of the Northern Territory (MAGNT), said once the museum learnt of the whale's beaching it decided to recover the remains.
Mr Archibald said it was his father, Ian, the museum's taxidermist at the time, who was tasked with recovering the bones, which alone weighed about 3,500 kilograms.
"A fishing boat was chartered, and my father and others went out and picked up all the vertebrae and ribs," he said.
Mr Archibald said the army was asked to help.
"They airlifted with a helicopter the one lower jaw — the other was too rotten — and the skull was delivered on the ground of the museum," he said.
Mr Archibald said his father, who clocked up 32-years service at the museum before he retired, worked for many years preparing the bones for public display.
Then Mr Archibald continued the work when he followed in his father's footsteps.
"I'm very happy that I did," Mr Archibald said.
The skeleton was put on display at the museum's Colin Jack-Hinton Maritime Gallery in the 1990s.
Just 11 pieces of the vertebrae were missing.
The museum's senior collections manager Gavin Dally said it was "pretty mind blowing" seeing the skeleton in the gallery.
"I remember, you could actually stand on the floor and just look up through the skeleton through the rib cage of the whale," he said.
"It's just really inspiring."
But by 1999 the skeleton required further preservation work and was taken to a Darwin warehouse.
The museum canvassed donations to pay for the work.
"You can see that the bones are quite brown and they're looking quite aged," Mr Dally said.
"To make them look really fresh and white again, we'll be doing a lot of work using fibreglass resins to make that happen."
Now the museum plans to bring the skeleton out of storage and reinstall it soon in the maritime gallery.
"I doubt there's been many people in the Northern Territory who have seen a blue whale," Mr Dally said.
