A hanging whale skeleton displayed indoors against a wooden wall.
The skeleton of a rare Stejneger’s beaked whale hangs in Storer Hall, collected in Alaska in the early 1980s by UC Davis alumnus Ed West and his wife Kathy, then carefully prepared and transported thousands of miles to campus, where it has presided for more than four decades. (Katrina Huynh / UC Davis)

Whale Tale: How the UC Davis Beaked Whale Found its Way to Campus

  • by Kate Washington

Long ago, on a faraway Aleutian island, a pair of rare beaked whales got stranded. One was saved by biologists and swam back out to sea. The other perished and its skeleton now hangs inland, thousands of miles from home.

The story might sound a little like the start of a children’s book, but it’s true—and students and visitors to UC Davis can find proof any time they walk into Storer Hall. The whale’s skeleton has hung in the building’s atrium for more than 40 years, thanks to Ed West (’80), who earned his Ph.D. from the zoology department (today, the Department of Evolution and Ecology), and is now the CEO of West Ecosystems Analysis in Davis.

Nobody at UC Davis was expecting a whale skeleton, but thanks to the intrepid spirits of Ed and his wife Kathy, who earned her master’s degree at UC Davis in primate ecology (BS ’79, MS ’82) and is now a wildlife conservation photographer, that’s what they got. 

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