The crowd has spoken, and the skeletal remains of a massive blue whale, on display in the atrium of Memorial University’s Core Science Building in St. John’s, now has a new name.
The whale was one of a number of the rare cetaceans crushed in sea ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 2014.
The Memorial University whale is one that ended up washing up on the beach in Rocky Harbour and the effort to flense the carcass and clean the bones grabbed worldwide attention.
(Still from video posted on Twitter by Jeff Hulan.)
MUN says it received close to 250 ideas for a name, which was eventually narrowed down to four choices—Altum, Apitakwitk, Aurora and Rocky.
After 5,128 votes, the winner was chosen. Altum is Latin for “deep” and comes from the university’s motto: “provehito in altum”, which means “launch forth into the deep.”
The Core Science Facility’s main atrium was designed to highlight the blue whale skeleton. Blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived on planet Earth.
