"And once in a while, oil dripped out of its nose," said Neil McArthur, the Pratt's building manager. "It was kind of sad and had become discolored and the ribs were working loose."

Closer inspection convinced Post that the skeleton needed a thorough evaluation.

"I got up there to put the bones back (in place) and it was kind of gross," Post said. "It needed so much cleaning, but had other problems with some bones being loose."

Last week, museum personnel and Post removed the whale from the eye-hooks and cables that held it in suspension, providing Post an opportunity to clean and realign bones, and assess what he and the museum have learned about the process of assembling skeletons in a quarter of a century.

"From a museum standpoint, that's kind of the gold standard — what will happen to whatever techniques are used over the long term," Post said. "Other markets are pretty much just concerned with getting something that looks good right now, but not as much concerned with what will look good 25 years from now."

After finding the whale in 1977, museum personnel Betsy Pitzman and Martha Madsen spent a year and a half cleaning the bones, according to notes Post reviewed. They enlisted chickens to peck away bits of meat, tried steam-cleaning bones with different solutions and scrubbed them with brushes.

"When I came into the picture, it was a pile of bones inside a warehouse," said Post, whose only other articulation experience was a rabbit when Post was in high school. "I said I'd be interested (in the project), but I didn't know anything about it." He was not the only one unfamiliar with the process.

"All the whales in museums in those days were done 100 years ago and there was no one alive who knew how to do it," said Post of research done the winter of 1979 and 1980. "There was a handful that had put a whale skeleton together in modern times, but there was nothing consistent about their methods. We were kind of reinventing the wheel."

That being the case, a one-step-at-a-time approach was launched, carefully thinking through and documenting the process. Working in a corner of the museum's basement, Post spent 170 hours over a six-week period, scrubbing the bones with a strong detergent and carefully piecing the whale bones together, reinforcing the assembled skeleton with metal rods, steel pins and glue.

Last week, Post viewed the skeleton with 25 years experience articulating an estimated 30 skeletons, including birds, bears and whales. He has carefully documented his learning process for others to follow in a set of manuals entitled "Bone Building Books" that have, to date, been shipped to 14 countries.

Post dusted and removed dirt from the 155 bones, cleaned some of the bones with ammonia, soap and water, and realized he had initially positioned the whale's ribs incorrectly.

"I moved and rearranged them and it is much better than it was," he said. "Knowing what I know now, I laid them out and looked at what made sense. It's a happier whale now."

In addition, Post identified what had worked, like the silicon used between vertebrae. Even though the epoxy discolored, it still held up, in spite of the amount of oil present. And as far as Post is aware, the Pratt Museum's Bering Sea beaked whale skeleton remains the only one of its species to be reassembled in the world.

"They really are a fairly rare and really unusual whale," said Post of the whales that prefer the cold, subarctic waters of the North Pacific and the Sea of Japan. "There isn't any place that has one put together. ... Whenever one is found, it is a big deal among whale biologists."

It also is a big deal at the Pratt Museum.

"It is an attention-getter," McArthur said.

McKibben Jackinsky can be reached at mckibben.jackinsky@homernews.com.