- I've had dozens of specimens come through this graveyard.

[soft music] So I like shallow sand burial.

It's been in the ground two years and one month, it's time to exhume it.

Within two months, we'll carefully dig the bones out, keep them organized for reference, but also possibly to build a display.

There are other indentations in the ground.

The biggest one is where a goose-beaked whale was buried.

As soon as that came out, I put a manatee in there.

They're the small ones, the ones that we can pick up and move.

Anything bigger than 15, 18 feet, we're likely to bury on the beach.

[soft inspiring music] To a New Jersey surfer, North Carolina is the promised land on the East Coast.

I figured out how to leave high school a semester early by volunteering for Cape Lookout National Seashore.

That was a great opportunity.

Served me well, and felt like I scored.

[chuckles] But when I met my future wife, she was very interested in marine wildlife as well.

North Carolina Marine Mammal Stranding Network, that my wife directs today, was being developed.

And so we were on the water every day, and we started to respond to the reports of dead and dying whales and dolphins on the beach.

And we find out that some of these things that come ashore in North Carolina, you can't find specimens, skeletons, of these animals in a museum or an academic institution.

I said, "Well, let's save this one."

We decided to bury our first dolphin carcass.

Two years later, we exhumed it, and we built our first skeleton out of it.

And then we got on a roll.

2004, a live sperm whale came ashore at cape lookout.

We went out, and by the time we got there, it had died.

The size is impressive.

It was 33 and a half feet.

And during the necropsy, someone said, "Keith, this is in your backyard.

It's an endangered species.

You could make a display out of this, and it would tell so many stories."

I had a four wheel drive truck out there.

It couldn't budge it.

Park service had a backhoe.

It couldn't drag it.

We spent a little over a week in cutting away more flesh, making it light enough, could drag it up to the grave, bagged and marked all the bones separately, and dumped the pieces in.

The bone prep in the sand took a total of four years.

The method works great, and it draws the grease outta the bones better than any other method, but it takes patience.

As it became evident we might save the bones for a display, we didn't have a place to do this work.

And the volunteer, Bruce McCutchen, whose chair I'm sitting in, said, "I've got a little space on the wood.

Let's get some volunteers to build a shed on my property.

How long will you need it for, and how big does it need to be?"

So I'd say, "A 40 foot long shed, and I think I can finish this work in three years."

And he said, "Keith, you got it."

Custom made for doing nothing but building a 33 and a half foot sperm whale skeleton.

And a lot of people who have done this sort of work, or even hadn't but wanted to learn, just got involved.

It gives me goosebumps to be back in here.

It's just, it was just a joy to be part of this volunteer-led effort.

And there's a bunch of volunteers who were just motivated.

The whole thing inspired them.

And a lot of people came through here, school groups, school buses.

So the artwork helped me explain what body parts, what skeletal components we were working on.

It was a privilege.

Coming here every day just taught me a lot about community support and volunteerism.

We installed Echo at the Maritime Museum.

The whole project, which I was sure wasn't going to work, was very much successful, and people were fascinated.

And so we saw, oh wow, there's a demand for this?

The idea got launched.

Could we, like, build something permanent to support the work, with running water?

And we met with bureaucrats and supervisors and volunteers.

They said it can work, and we're gonna do it.

Bone Henge is in the museum, there's like trip hazards and sharp things and fragile things within reach.

But this is a cool workshop.

What I do in here, for better and for worse, is address conservation issues, and focus on very sad stories.

And so we're saving these specimens that have a conservation message.

If plastic in the stomach killed it, you know, if entanglement killed it, I'm gonna have something to tell that story if I can.

[soft music] Our Marine Mammal Stranding Network got a call.

"I am standing next to a live, breathing dolphin."

When our team got there, I could tell it was not a dolphin.

It was a Gervais's beaked whale.

The goal for the necropsy is to learn about the animal and possibly reveal the cause of the stranding, possibly the cause of death.

Look in the stomach, look at all the organs.

Take tissue samples, teeth for aging, you know, lungs for parasites.

Things I don't understand, but the veterinarians are masters at this.

But the "oh wow" moment was the entrance to the four stomach, and it had something blocking it that we pulled out, is literally this.

But this is all it took.

One time a woman said, "Keith, people use balloon releases for grieving."

I pointed to the picture of the dead whale, and I told her that this makes some of us grieve.

If it weren't for those good people that do the necropsies, we wouldn't know about cases like this.

I need help letting people know that these balloons don't go to heaven.

[gentle uplifting music] So a live sperm whale came ashore in North Carolina.

What I wanted was to estimate the age of this whale.

Weird thing about deep divers, they lack upper jaw teeth.

And that's the case of sperm whales.

So this is the original tooth from that socket.

I cut it.

And if you look carefully, lines are revealed.

We think those lines correspond to years of growth, like rings in a tree, and enabled me to estimate that this was a 23-year-old whale when it came ashore and died.

If it's not a toothed whale, the other group of whales are baleen whales.

They lack teeth.

And the baleen is only in the upper jaw, and inside the lower jaw in the throat when they're feeding, is literally tons of water and terrified fish.

It's easy to say, "Whales do this, whales do that."

But they're as different as elephants and shrews.

Whales that are swimming out there, they see opportunities and barriers that we're not even close to recognizing.

Well, I'd like you to look at this.

The red dot is a tagged right whale, and it's doing what's predictable, a northbound migration.

The blue are ships.

Just feel free to wince with me every time you see a blue slash intersect the red dot, which is the whale.

These are just the ships that wanna donate their location and time and identity for this study.

It made it, and it's amazing anything does.

[soft music] And this is the biggest thing that will ever be in here.

Pitfall is a skeleton of a 37 foot 3-year-old humpback whale that came ashore on North Duxbury Beach, Massachusetts in 2001.

The necropsy revealed that she had been hit by a ship.

The ship strike snapped her upper jaws off her face.

It broke, I mean, this is like an oak tree.

The veterinarians told me she probably died instantly.

We have just about completed the skull.

We're starting to mount the vertebrae on this pipe that will support them, starting to mount the ribs.

The flippers of this girl will be 12 feet long.

And so that is an accurate mock-up, and that will be our guide.

And there's a couple other ship-striked whales on exhibit places, and they did a beautiful job covering up all the damage, and I didn't wanna make this look pretty.

[soft atmospheric music] I am trying to figure out a way to not be such a bummer.

I think I have this disease, it's called distantoceanphobia, fear of being away from the ocean.

I just made that up.

That was a joke.

- Oh, cool.

- I have something positive to share with you, and it actually gives me goosebumps to be able to say this.

We have documented 35 species of citations in North Carolina.

What's the big deal about 35?

Well, this isn't a competition.

I'm not bragging.

I would love to be proven wrong, but that's more than any other state.

So I want anyone who comes into the Bone Henge Whale Center, or comes to a presentation, or sees an exhibit, to be aware of that incredible diversity.

We can produce things to teach people and people can learn.

Meet Kanga.

We created this so that educators can take the box to venues, festivals, schools, and it'll be the complete skeleton of a bottlenose dolphin.

And compared to humans, what's similar, and what's different.

And the flippers of a dolphin are the same bones we have in our arms, including phalanges arranged into five digits.

Not many places people get to see that.

It's just so incredible, that a sperm whale, like what stranded on Cape Lookout, can alter everything in my life.

I want them to know, not just that this is a sperm whale skeleton.

Oh look, isn't that cool?

I want them to know where it stranded and when, and just use the skeleton to help tell more of a story, the story of this endangered species.

Why is it endangered?

Do they still exist on earth, or are they extinct?

Can we still see them in North Carolina?

And wow, isn't that cool?

'Cause the answer is yes.

I mean, I'm an environmentalist.

I care deeply about protecting marine life.

I want people to know how much we have to lose.

[soft inspiring music]