Innere Organe des Finnwals

Fin whale organs gone wrong

The historic Fin whale skeleton in the chancel of the St. Catherine's Hall and the giant organs displayed in a showcase under them appear as a single logical unit. Although all of the exhibits come from a Fin whale stranded in 1825 on the West coast of Rügen, the reason for their joint presentation is by no means self-evident. The skeleton and the internal organs underwent a long and confusing odyssey through a range of locations before they came together again due to a number of coincidences in the German Oceanographic Museum.

The stranding of the whale at the time put not only the fishermen of the region, but also the world of science in an uproar. Due to the extensive damage to the skeleton and the rotting carcass the specimen could not be uniquely identified initially. That was only finally made in 1908 by scientists at the University of Greifswald. The whale arrived there after it was killed by the Rügen fishermen. They significantly damaged the animal body at that time out of ignorance and exploitation of the find. For that reason the genitals of the male animal and other internal organs could only be saved just in time before the planned smoking by an innkeeper in Gingst, as one of the professors at the time in Greifswald described. They were housed at the Anatomical Institute of the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University.

It was not until 1978 that some organs of the Fin whale – the penis, the trachea and the aortic arch – came to Stralsund as a result of scientific exchange activities. During this time, the transformation of the former Museum of Nature to an oceanographic museum was in full swing and collections no longer needed were exchanged for marine biological exhibits.