FIRST CHANCE TO STUDY SUCH A SPECIMEN IN 10 YEARS
It has been a decade since the museum last had the opportunity to study a whale carcass found in Singapore waters.
In 2015, the year the museum opened, the carcass of a sperm whale washed up near Jurong Island, the museum said. It was later dubbed Jubi Lee.
Jubi Lee represented the first record of a sperm whale in Singapore’s territorial waters, as well as the first confirmed record of the species in the coastal waters around Peninsular Malaysia, according to the museum.
It had been on display in the museum’s gallery since 2016, with the museum describing it as one of its centrepieces and “a treasured part of Singapore’s natural heritage”.
More than a century before Jubi Lee’s discovery, in 1907, the present National Museum of Singapore put on display the skeleton of a 13.4m-long blue whale that was found stranded near Melaka in 1892.
This specimen was formally gifted to the National Museum of Malaysia in 1974.
