Beaty Biodiversity Museum I Spy Event

The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is Vancouver’s natural history museum, dedicated to creating a shared sense of community and wonder. “ ”

BIODIVERSITY

Through exhibits, hands-on activities, educators’ resources, public presentations, and community and cultural engagement, we illuminate how biodiversity evolved, how it is maintained, why it matters, and how we can conserve it. The museum seeks to nurture the sense of wonder that many—especially youth—feel in experiencing biodiversity in hopes that they choose to preserve it as citizens, and perhaps study it as scientists.

Science studies life’s diversity to understand common principles underlying the biology of all species, how our ecosystems came to be and how they function, and to learn how to act sustainably. UBC is one of the world’s leading universities in biodiversity research. The museum’s researchers, curators, and dedicated and creative outreach staff all work toward celebrating human responses to biodiversity, including art, culture, and our own love for biodiversity.

HISTORY

The biological collections of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum were each started by a different collector, some as early as the 1910s. Over the decades, the collections were added to by myriad researchers, and grew to contain over two million specimens. In 2001, researchers at the Biodiversity Research Centre (Botany and Zoology departments) conceived a building to facilitate interdisciplinary work on biodiversity, house UBC’s biodiversity researchers and collections, and contain a public natural history museum.

For years, Ross and Trisha Beaty, UBC alumni, envisioned—and endowed—a public museum of natural history in British Columbia, a community asset that would profile the amazing wonders of the natural world, in one of the most species-rich places on earth.

RESEARCH

The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is part of UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Centre (BRC), which brings the University’s world-class biodiversity researchers and natural history collections together. The BRC is composed of more than 50 internationally renowned scientists, all dedicated to the study of biodiversity. Interdisciplinary working groups study the biological forces that produce and sustain biodiversity, as well as the forces that lead to extinction and the local and global consequences of its loss.

Biodiversity research aims to document the enormous diversity of life on Earth and to identify the factors that generate and maintain this diversity. Scientists at the BRC investigate the ecology, evolution, and conservation of biological diversity through research at all levels, from genes to ecosystems through to interactions with society. As the scope of global

climate change, human-caused habitat alterations, and associated extinction rates rise, the need to understand and conserve biodiversity and the ecosystem functions that it sustains has never been more pressing.

DRAW SOMETHING YOU SEE:

BLUE WHALE EXHIBIT

The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is home to Canada’s largest blue whale skeleton, a magnificent exhibit that illustrates the interconnectedness of all living things. Blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived on earth. They rarely strand on beaches, and very few skeletons have been recovered for research or display. Worldwide, only 21 are available for public viewing.

On the remote northwestern coast of PEI in 1987, a 26 m long mature female blue whale died and washed ashore near the town of Tignish. In hopes of preserving the whale’s skeleton for research or museum display, the PEI government and the Canadian Museum of Nature arranged for the skeleton to be dragged off the beach near Nail Pond, and buried. The remains of the whale were longer than two Vancouver trolley buses parked one behind the

other, and weighed an estimated 80,000 kg. Her burial was a mammoth task.

Because of the difficulty of unearthing and displaying such a large animal, the whale skeleton remained under the red PEI dirt for two decades. The process of retrieving, degreasing, repairing and articulating it began in 2007 and the installation in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum was completed in May 2010.