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Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil

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201 points geox | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 23:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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poulsbohemian ◴[19 Oct 24 17:55 UTC] No.41889361[source]▶
Ok I'm going to come out and say it because I think multiple people in this thread have hinted at the same confusion: What bloody kind of oil are we talking about here? Whale oil, that somehow was captured in the bones? Petroleum oil from the whale's encounter with the tanker? They basically buried the lede on this story and nowhere appear to explain why this particular whale is dripping some kind of "oil" that seemingly other museum example don't experience. So - anyone got any insight here?
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gwbas1c ◴[19 Oct 24 21:58 UTC] No.41891084[source]▶
It's rather obvious that it's whale oil, given that whales used to be hunted for their oil. I don't know how you could even assume that a whale skeleton would drip petroleum.

Funny anecdote: The automatic transmission used to be lubricated with whale oil because it (whale oil) could handle higher temperatures than petroleum based lubricants. It was banning whaling in the 20th century that lead to developing petroleum-based high-heat lubricants.

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1. giraffe_lady ◴[20 Oct 24 02:08 UTC] No.41892363[source]▶
I think the transmission stuff was sperm oil, wax from head of a sperm whale. Which probably accounts for some of the confusion here. There were several different products derived from whales, if you're not aware of that you wouldn't expect to find sperm whale dome grease in a blue whale's bones.

The nomenclature isn't that clear, and none of us have first hand experience with any of them anymore so all of our knowledge about this is from third hand reddit TILs and moby dick.