May 4, 2018 — NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — A life-size model of a blue whale heart arrived at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on Thursday, all the way from New Zealand.

Visitors are welcome to crawl inside the heart, which has four chambers and is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

“It’s pretty spectacular,” Chief Curator Christina Connett said.

The heart is the first major element in a complete redesign of the Jacobs Family Gallery and other spaces for an exhibit titled Whales Today, which focuses on ecology and conservation. Other elements to come include a model of a whale’s head with baleen, plus life-size silhouettes of whale flukes.

The museum staff had waited for days to hear that the heart had cleared customs. Finally it was ready, and it arrived at 8:05 a.m. in a shipping container trucked from Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times