While most of his classmates had left for lunch, sophomore Maddox Rogers was in teacher Zachary Tourville’s science classroom working on reconstructing an orca sternum.
He’s using wires and tape to hold the bones in place to anatomically correct positions. Then the students will cover it with silicone to create the joints between the skeleton pieces.
“We don’t want it to be a punk rock whale, so we’re trying to make it look smoother and more cartilagey-ish so we put this silicone stuff over it,” said Rogers.
Rogers and several other Haines students have been working on the reconstruction of the juvenile orca skeleton for most of the last semester.
Now they’re scrambling to get it done before the end of the school year so it can be hung somewhere in the building.
“Some of the students are really into it and putting a lot of effort into it,” said Tourville. “I think it’ll be done before the end of the week. I believe it’s possible.”
The process started with two totes full of dirty bones that local resident Gershon Cohen had stored away at home. Cohen realized it could make a good school project and brought the bins into the school to see if Tourville would be interested in making it an educational project. Tourville jumped at the idea and the two went through with transferring the permit to use the bones, which are regulated under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The students started by bleaching the bones in soapy water, and then scrubbing them with hydrogen peroxide. They’re now mostly white.
“We coulda soaked it in water for a little longer, but we had to keep working,” Tourville said.
The group used a digital 3D model of an orca skeleton that had been uploaded online by the Natural History Museum of the University of Pisa. The class also used Lee Post’s “The Whale Building Book.”
Getting the bones to stick in the right places required ingenuity. Students bent and twisted half-inch threaded steel pieces to hold the skull. They used twine on the top of the skull to hold the jaw bone. Wire covered in silicone covered the gaps between the whale’s flipper bones.
Several pieces were missing, so students and Cohen made plaster or ceramic replacements to complete the skeleton and jawbone.
“They’re still painting the fake teeth to make them look realistic,” said Tourville. “The skeleton was almost perfectly complete, just a couple things missing. Definitely nothing to complain about.”
Tourville said the whole class started on the project, but eventually there were just a handful who were the most interested. Rogers and fellow students JC Davis, Isabelle Alamillo and Matthew Rosenberry took the lead on most of the project. They had to backtrack a few times, like when they attached the ribs to the wrong vertebrae.
Rogers said it was a good learning experience for the group.
“This is just a great way to spend a class period,” said Rogers. “It’s just interesting and a very unique task.”
The students came up with a name for the animal — Vivus, which is Latin for “alive.” So far, the school hasn’t selected a location for the skeleton to hang.