Youngsters interested in whales and other marine animals got a hands-on learning experience at the main branch of the Wareham Free Library Thursday evening, taking turns handling various kinds of whale bones.

Under the guidance of whale expert and volunteer speaker David Wiley, Ph. D., the kids got to hold pilot whale, humpback whale, and dolphin vertebrae; baleen from right whales; and five-foot tall ivory walrus tusks.

Wiley shared both his artifacts and his stories about whales, telling a group of twenty young listeners that ranged in age of about six to thirteen about the wide world of tagging and tracking these great leviathans of the deep.

The Wareham resident has been working with whales for 30 years, and currently works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He is also a research director at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, which encompasses 842 square miles of ocean stretching between Cape Ann and Cape Cod.

Wiley is a past recipient of a gold medal from the U.S. Department of Commerce for his collaboration with fishermen to develop new ways to reduce the risk of whale entanglement of fishing lines, and his work with the shipping industry mitigating boat accidents with whales by relocating shipping lanes.

Wiley, who is originally from upstate New York, said studying whales "was not part of my plan, but I just kind of fell into it."

“I started going out on whale watching boats, and then started working on a whale watching boat, and got more interested in all the things there was to learn about whales, just by being out on the ocean watching them," Wiley said. "Now we have more technology than we can dream of.”

The young audience got to watch a video about some of that technology. In the video, researchers followed the whales in boats, and use a crossbow to land a suction cup on the whales. The suction cup had a video camera and computer, and told the researchers everything the whale did under water.

But, sometimes, Wiley said, that technology isn't as reliable, when dealing with right whales, due to their specific social natures.

“Right whales make contact calls particularly in the evening," Wiley said. "They call each other together to socialize, and they rub against each other and sometimes knock off the suction cups when they do. The humpbacks are easier to track because they don't do that same behavior.”

Wareham resident Angela Andrews brought her daughter Alyx, a second grader at Decas Elementary.

“I love the hand-on, the vertebrae, baleen, barnacles," Andrews said. "How cool is that? He definitely helped keeping the kids attention.”

“My son's favorite thing in the world is Shark Week,” said Wareham resident Phil Moreau, whose third-grade son Mark, and first-grade daughter Layla, came to listen to Wiley's talk. “I have also been always interested in marine life. It's like almost like looking at aliens. I'm glad my kids are interested in things that are educational. When there are things like this around town, we like to do it because it's healthy good fun for them.”