Hope

Hope is the new icon of the Natural History Museum, a stunning 9,000 pound, 82-foot-long blue whale skeleton.

Suspended by steel wires and captured in a majestic swooping posture, her reconstruction is a work of art as well as a feat of engineering.

Her story begins in 1891 when she was found beached off the coast of Ireland.

A lucrative find for a local fisherman, her skeletal remains were sold to the Museum.

The project to restore her took three years to complete, including 10 months of painstaking laboratory work to clean and repair each of her 221 bones.

Combining the latest scientific research into the blue whale with behind-the-scenes imagery, this book sheds new light on the largest creature ever to have lived on Earth.