The Los Angeles County Natural History Museum has quite a skeleton crew in the city of Vernon. Thousands of bones are stored in the museum's Large Mammal Warehouse there, including those of a wayward whale, a temperamental polar bear, a freedom-seeking hippo and a historic fire horse.
The eerily-quiet specimens, some with gaping jaws filled with giant teeth, are kept in the sign-less building for research or future display in the Exposition Park museum.
But some are just too unwieldy to be moved -- for example, "giant whale ribs that don't fit through the . . . museum's freight elevator," noted the Naturalist, the museum's magazine. One celebrity occupant, Minnie the whale, is in a different category -- her skeleton is in too many pieces for display.
The 63-foot-long behemoth's body was spotted bobbing in the surf off Long Beach on May 4, 1897, by a lad identified in the newspapers only as "barefoot Charlie." The spectacle attracted workers for a house-moving company who roped and towed her ashore.
Minnie was left in the sand there for several days, becoming, in effect, Long Beach's first tourist attraction. Railroads offered special "Whale Excursions" for sightseers. "It's interesting how the whole town seemed to show up in their Sunday finest for a family portrait next to a dead whale," commented museum zoologist Jim Dines. Before being donated to the museum, Minnie had several other owners who cut her skeleton into pieces so that it would fit inside buildings. But it's still of interest to some of the scientists who visit the warehouse from as far as New Zealand, Australia and Japan.
"Because her skull was cut up," Dines explained, "scientists have the opportunity to see where her brain case was. They can compare the shape of the skull cavity with that of whales that lived millions of years ago. It helps trace the evolutionary history of the species."
The warehouse also houses the skeleton of a polar bear who made headlines when he attacked his trainer in 1917 in a Los Angeles arena near the corner of Washington Boulevard and Main Street. "The trainer's screams brought people rushing from all directions," The Times reported.
Policeman C. E. Abel, who was walking his beat nearby, raced over and fired several rounds, killing the animal. The trainer, Jack Bonavita, died from his injuries. As a side note, The Times reported that 12 years earlier, the unfortunate Bonavita had had his right hand "eaten from the arm by a lion at Coney Island."
