The modern legend of the Thames whale, 10 years on
Sitting in a glass case are the bones of the Thames whale. They lie arrayed in sad splendour; the great eyeless skull, the mountain range of vertebrae, the delicate bones of the flippers. And, at the tail of the whale, there's a little bottle containing oil from its bones. Carefully stoppered, it resembles nothing so much as a collection of the creature's tears.
Ten years ago next week, on 20 January 2006, the whale - a northern bottlenose - swam up the Thames and created a sensation. As the drama played out over the next two days, the world's media assembled along the banks of the river, or hovered overhead. For the first time since Winston Churchill's funeral, the waterway was closed. A strange kind of mass hysteria came over London, and the country. This one animal was so well-tracked it might have been the last of its kind. As Richard Sabin, of the Natural History Museum, noted so astutely, she had become a "personality animal", one invested with our human longings. Sabin, looking back over the story, in which he played a key role, still finds the event "very moving".
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