A 16-metre-long dead whale was found on Levy's Beach near Warrnambool and is Victoria's first complete specimen.

The Department of Environment and Primary Industries worked with the museum to remove the whale from the beach. It will be used for research and education and will be on display for the public.

Museum Victoria senior curator vertebrate palaeontology, Dr Erich Fitzgerald, said this whale was the first of its kind to wash up on Victorian shores in at least 160 years.

"It's very difficult to study these animals in the wild. We're at the bottom of a very steep learning curve," he said.

"The fin whale is a great case study for evolutionary change. We humans think we're exceptional, but we're pretty boring - whales are really weird."

Studying whale skeletons present massive logistical challenges due to their size and weight.

Museum Victoria preparator Peter Swinkels said excavators, like those used on roads and in building sites, had to be used to help dissect the animal and move its bones.

"The skull weighs between 800 kilograms and 1.3 tonnes alone," he said.

"The mechanical equipment lifted it up the beach and onto trailers. The bones were then taken to a farm where a farmer had prepared a sand bed for us."

The bones will remain on the sand bed until the remaining flesh decomposes with the help of insects and bacteria, a process likely to take 12 to 18 months. After this the bones will be transported to the museum where they will be studied and placed on display.

Mr Swinkels has 20 years' experience dissecting whales and said the animal was in poor health before its death.

"We don't know exactly why it died, but it was quite skinny for its size," he said.

"The smells initially when you first start to dissect the whale aren't all that bad, although it depends on how old the animal is. However as soon as you remove the tissues and get to the organs there are some smells."

While the whale was being dissected a 500-metre exclusion zone was set up around the whale, stopping the public from coming any closer to the ocean giant.

The whale's blubber, which can take years to decompose, has been taken to a licensed animal waste premises at Naroghid in south-western Victoria.

Fin whales, which are endangered species, are the thinnest and fastest of the toothless whales, but this does not mean they are not imposing in size.

Mature adults weigh up to 80 tonnes and can reach 27 metres in length. They also consume an impressive 1000 kilograms of food a day and a single gulp of water contains 70,000 litres of water.

There are only five other whales of this type on display in Australia.

"Collecting this specimen allows us to record a snapshot of the diversity in time and space," Dr Fitzgerald said.

The fin whale was badly affected by commercial whaling since the early 20th  century. Today they are rarely seen in the southern hemisphere's oceans.

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that between 1904 and 1979, 750,000 fin whales were killed in the southern hemisphere.

There are no estimates of how many fin whales remain in the Indian Ocean.