Beaty Biodiversity Museum

Over the last six weeks or so, I've been working at the soon-to-be-fully-open Beaty Biodiversity Museum at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.  The museum is unusual in that it both houses the research collections of UBC's various biological faculties while also opening those same collections up to the public.  Visitors have the opportunity to look into the actual storage units and meander through the maze of cabinets housing 500,000 specimens of plants, algae, fungi and the like, 600,000 specimens of bugs, beatles, and butterflies, more shells that you could count, 40,000 specimens of land vertebrates, 800,000 fish specimens, and over 20,000 fossils from around the world. 

The highlight of the collections until the museum opens (and probably afterwards too) is a beautifully articulated skeleton of an enormous - and I mean ENORMOUS - blue whale that hangs in the atrium of the museum's entrance.          

So what have I been doing?  Something far less impressive than that whale.  You see those little windows down below?  Well, I've been making sure that what's inside is worth the look.  Those windows are scattered through out the museum (which extends in rows and rows and rows of cabinets behind) are little windows into the beauties, oddities, rhythms, and ruptures that make up the diversity and balance of the natural world around us.  Unfortunately the window reflection makes picture-taking difficult.  Mine didn't turn out nearly as nice as these photographs by Dean Chura and posted on flickr here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanchura-earthboundphotographer/sets/72157624132018828/

 

The museum will be hosting a series of free previews with talks and tours throughout the summer, so if you are in Vancouver, be sure to check it out.  The entire museum will be open in the fall.  Find out all the details of preview events here + http://www.beatymuseum.ubc.ca/visitors.html 

  

Comments

[Maika]

This place looks/sounds phenomenal! I've been meaning to visit Vancouver for a while, but now I think it's going to be absolutely imperative as soon as the museum is completely open to the public. Congratulations on the work you've done there and thank you for sharing it with us.