No, that’s how they used to do it. The Hatfield Marine Science Center has a new blue whale skeleton.

The thing about a blue whale skeleton is that’s not a thing you can just go out and get. You’re obviously not going to go hunt one. There aren’t blue whales in captivity. If you’re a natural history museum and want an elephant skeleton, you can get one from a zoo after the elephant dies of natural causes. Not so much for blue whales. If you want a blue whale skeleton to display, you’re just going to have to wait until a blue whale washes up dead on the beach.

I’m not sure if this is documented anywhere online. But if you go to the Hatfield Marine Science Center itself and browse through their exhibits, one documents the process they used to clean the skeleton.

They did it by first carving the whale carcass into big chunks. They then wrapped these in nets and hung them from buoys that suspended the chunks into the water column of Yaquina Bay. Little sea critters could swim through the net and pick away at the rotting whale flesh, while the net prevented bones from being carried away. They effectively did a controlled artificial shallow-water whale fall.

So nowadays, on the Oregon Coast, you eat a whale by letting it be devoured by the small fish and crustaceans of Yaquina Bay.