A BLUE whale skeleton has found an unlikely home hours from Australia's western coastline.
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The roughly $10,000 eight-metre replica skeleton looms over the foyer of the newest building at Calrossy Anglican School's William Cowper campus and is hoped to give students a whale of a time.
The renovations are part of a broader development that will see both male and female students from years seven to nine educated at the William Cowper campus, science and engineering teacher Todd McDonald said.
"I was involved in the instigation and design of the new building, when I walked through there's a large foyer with beautiful windows and it was begging for a feature," Mr McDonald said.
"My head of department Mary Koch and I decided it needed something up there and we came up with the concept of a blue whale or other skeleton.
"It just fitted the space nicely and we will use that as a teaching tool with anatomy and so forth as well as a feature about our learning.
"The skeleton is eight metres long and that's a baby blue whale, the actual adult blue whales grow to the length of the entire building which is 40-odd metres."
The two-storey science and technology building was finished about two months ago with our state-of-the-art science labs, technology rooms for textiles and art and a large drama and dance studio.
With little in the way of skeleton shops - the journey to find the perfect replica feature was interesting in itself.
There weren't suitable options in Australia, so the skeleton had to be sourced from overseas from a company that manufactures replica dinosaur skeletons for museums.
The 400kg steel and fibre-glass replica came in an IKEA-style box which Mr McDonald had to assemble four-metres in the air.
"The set of instructions were a simple photograph of how it should look when it's finished, we got it together in the end," he said.
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"It got installed two days before Christmas so nobody has seen it yet, there will be some surprised faces on the first day of school this year."
As part of the school program, students look at human and animal anatomy so the structure will be both aesthetic and a functional part of study.
Classes will return January 28.