Whales carry quite a bit of bacteria and parasites. They’re a pretty big ecosystem on their own when they’re swimming in the ocean, so there’s a lot of stuff on whales that you probably don’t want to ...

An Oregon highway engineer who blew up a dead beached whale with a half-ton of dynamite in 1970 has died at the age of 84. George Thomas Thornton gained national attention over the exploding whale, ...

The grim task of clearing hundreds of washed-up whale carcasses was under way in New Zealand Tuesday, with the beach closed over fears the bodies will fill with gas and explode as they decompose. The ...

EUGENE, Ore. — Both the Eugene Emeralds and KATU’s classic news footage of the “exploding whale” got a shout-out on the latest episode of “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver. What does Oregon’s ...

The word “meme” didn’t exist when Paul Linnman and Doug Brazil—a KATU-TV reporter and cameraman, respectively—chartered a flight from Portland to Florence one cool November day in 1970, and the notion ...

Fifty-five years ago, a dead sperm whale washed ashore near Florence — and what happened next became one of the most infamous moments in state history. Engineers from the Oregon Highway Division, ...