The afterlife of Hai Hai the baby minke whale (pictured above) started inauspiciously. His three-tonne corpse, beached on a Chinese island in 2009, was already rotting by the time scientists reached it. Undeterred, a team of almost three dozen anatomists swung into action, labouring for nearly two years to preserve, dehydrate and plastinate it, before reassembling it to reveal musculature on one side, and bones, nerves and organs on the other.

Now, Hai Hai, the world’s largest plastinated marine animal, is the star of Sea Creatures , an exhibition of more than 50 similarly …