Real Whale of a Surprise for Natural History Buffs

For first-time visitors to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, the skeletal remains of the largest animal in the history of our planet comes as a surprise. Guarding the entrance to the museum, the gleaming white skeleton is that of a blue whale that died of unknown causes and floated ashore near Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Santa Barbara in 1980.

What do you do with a dead whale that is 72 feet long and at one time weighed 70 to 80 tons? Museum scientists aided by volunteers were determined to preserve it. Undaunted that the whale was lying on the beach at the base of a 100-foot cliff, they began work. The bones were freed from the corpse, hauled up the cliff by winch and trucked to the museum where the cleaning process alone required more than a year.

The whale is only one of the natural science exhibits you will discover upon entering this cluster of Spanish-style buildings set on 14 acres of tree-shaded Mission Canyon. The museum was founded in 1916 and is devoted to studying and interpreting the natural sciences.

Sea Shell Collection

Among its extensive collections are thousands of sea shells gathered from the eastern Pacific. In a large hall containing mounted bird specimens there are loons, pelicans, cormorants, blue herons and a peregrine falcon, to name just a few. Roughly 400 of California’s 500 species of birds are found in the Santa Barbara region.

The museum has been involved in programs to save the California condor from extinction, in ensuring survival of marine mammals along the coast, providing biological surveys of the Channel Islands and promoting good stewardship of other areas.

Last year a fire on Santa Barbara’s familiar landmark, Stearns Wharf, nearly demolished the museum’s satellite Sea Center. Fortunately, the building and exhibits were repaired and the Sea Center, which has been called a mirror of the Channel Islands, was re-opened. It features models of a gray whale, bottleneck dolphins and six seawater aquariums.

Branches of science represented at the museum include geology, ornithology, anthropology, mammalogy and archeology. However, staff scientists working in these fields are not limited to the land and sea surrounding Santa Barbara, for there are those who are searching the heavens. The museum has a planetarium and astronomical observatory with programs every Sunday afternoon.

Chumash Artifacts

The museum has the largest collection of Chumash Indian artifacts outside the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The Chumash inhabited the Santa Barbara region for 7,000 years before they encountered Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who discovered California in 1542. When Juan Bautista de Anza passed through their villages in 1775, he marveled at their basketry, boxes skillfully made of wood and finely carved stone objects. Chumash basketry was sought by the Spanish explorers and other early visitors to the California coast. A recent acquisition by the museum is a rare Chumash basket collected by a Nantucket sailor whose whaling ship anchored somewhere near Santa Barbara about 1818.

For the Chumash and for the other tribes inhabiting virtually every part of what is now California--each with a subculture conditioned by the region in which it lived--life was good. The vastness of the land, the relative ease with which the physical needs of man were met and the overpowering terrain with its natural beauty gave the California Indians an existence stabilized in material ways. The coming of the Europeans would change this.

The museum, which is privately funded, continues to research and preserve the remnants of the Chumash culture and that of other tribes that inhabited California before the coming of the Europeans.

Hours of the museum are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $3 for adults; $2 for seniors and students, 13-17. Children younger than 12 are $1.

To reach the museum from the south, turn right on Santa Barbara Street from U.S. 101. Continue north to Los Olivos, turn right on Los Olivos, continue past the Santa Barbara Mission and follow signs to the museum. Information: (805) 682-4711.