The skeleton of a dead pilot whale washed up on Las Teresitas beach in Santa Cruz, is being displayed in Tenerife. The whale was found stranded on the beach in 2019 and its skeleton has been reconstructed and installed at the La Tahonilla Wildlife Recovery Centre for people to see.
It was reconstructed by marine biologist, Manuel Carrillo, who was one of the most renowned researchers with the most knowledge about cetaceans in the Canary Islands before he passed away in 2021 at the age of 64.
Pilot whales can be seen in the Canary Islands all year round, mainly between Tenerife and La Gomera. Females measure between 3 and 4 metres long and can weigh about 800 kilograms, whilst males exceed five metres and can weigh up to 1,500 kilograms.
At the inauguration of the display, the biologist's widow, Josefa Esther Medina, was given a small box with a silver pendant that is a reproduction of the last vertebra of a pilot whale.
Carrillo was the architect, among other projects, of the path of the Cetaceans in Fuerteventura, and was responsible for the assembly of whale skeletons exhibited in Los Silos (Tenerife) and in Charco de San Ginés, in Lanzarote, as well as the assembly of the Llanca Whale, a fin whale that washed up on the Catalan coast more than 150 years ago and which is suspended from the ceiling of the Blau, the new building of the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona.
