Hope (whale)

Hope is the skeleton of a blue whale displayed in the main hall of the Natural History Museum, London.

A juvenile female blue whale was found by a fisherman Edward Wickham on 25 March 1891, stranded on a sand bar in Wexford Harbour, on the southeast coast of Ireland.

The Receiver of Wreck sold her carcass at auction for £111 to the local harbour master William Armstrong, from which Wickham and the other salvagers were paid £50 for their work.

After the whale flesh and blubber were removed, the Natural History Museum in London bought the 221 bones of the 4.5-tonne skeleton, along with her baleen plates, for £250.

The 25.2 m (83 ft) skeleton was kept in storage until 1934, when it went on display in the museum's new Mammal Hall, suspended above a similarly sized plaster model of a blue whale.