Whale tale helps Cambridge reach 10 million views

The University of Cambridge is celebrating topping over 10 million views on YouTube, and a story from the Fitzwilliam’s Hamilton Kerr conservation institute is ranked number 6 of its 700 videos.

Whale tale: a Dutch seascape and its lost Leviathan has been viewed over 213,690 times. The video shows how a conservator made a surprising discovery while working on a 17th-century painting of a Dutch beach scene. As Shan Kuang cleaned the surface, she revealed the beached whale that had been the intended focus of the composition.

View of Scheveningen Sands by Hendrick van Anthonissen is likely to have been overpainted to conceal the whale in the 18th or 19th century, before it was given to the Fitzwilliam in 1873.

Other top ranked videos included a video on nano-science narrated by Stephen Fry, new technologies tackling the energy crisis, the one atom thick wonder material graphene, and how T-cells hunt down and kill cancer cells in our bodies.

6 August 2015