#MuseumWeek Retrospective!

Last week's #MuseumWeek tweetstorm was an awful lot of fun, especially following the #SciArt event just a few weeks earlier. I thought I'd share a couple of photos and thoughts for each day's theme – I didn't manage to post something for each day on Twitter, but I'll fill in some thoughts and photos here!

Day 1: Secrets

One of the nice things about working in the Paleontology & Geology Research Lab at the North Carolina Musuem of Natural Sciences is that "behind the scenes" is part of the scene. You can actually stare at me while I'm working away at my computer each day, if you desire to do such a thing. More interesting, probably, would be to watch our staff, students, and volunteers preparing fossils in the main lab space - secrets waiting to be revealed. But hey, whatever floats your boat!

If you're in Raleigh, stop by and say hi to Carnufex!

Day 2: Souvenirs

I am kind of a Stuff Person and also have a Thing for Museum Gift Shops. As such, I have loads of doodads from my various museum visits. One of the things I like picking up are postcards, especially those that have non-Tyrannosaurus dinosaurs featured on them. For a while, I had these up on my wall at my apartment in Edmonton. Those who have visited my UofA office will also be familiar with my embarassingly large collection of ankylosaur toys, or as I prefer to refer to them, 'scientific models for grown-ups'.

Recognize any museums from your own travels?

Day 3: Architecture

I had a lot of fun with this one on twitter because I LOVE interesting museum architecture. A couple of favourites:

Permian Hall at the Moscow Paleontological Museum:

...which also had custom door hinges, like plesiosaurs!

Dinosaur museum in an old castle in Lerici, Italy:

I wasn't sure about the ROM Crystal at first, but it's grown on me:

And I think the SECU Daily Planet at the NC Museum is pretty swell (on the inside, it's a theatre!):

Day 4: Inspiration

Some non-dinosaur stuff for inspiration day: I really like learning about Canadian art and its history, and one of my very favourite museums on the entire planet is the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. If you're in Vancouver, DO NOT MISS THAT MUSEUM. It's an emotional experience to step into the exhibits at this museum and be surrounded by so much creativity and history and skill. Here's a sample to sharpen your brain.

Day 5: Family

I'm lucky to have had great parents that fed my dinosaur obsession as a kid with trips to museums near and far. I'd love to dig out some photos from the before time, but for now, I'll leave this day for my own memories. What are some of your favourite museum memories from your childhood?

Day 6: Favourites

I like busy museums that are crammed full of stuff, especially when that takes the form of a Wall of Stuff or a Hall of Stuff. Here's a few of my favourites.

Hall of Stuff at the Museo de La Plata

Wall of Stuff at the Natural History Museum of LA County

Day 7: Pose

I don't like posting pictures of myself very much, so I'll just include one here to finish off: here's Pinacosaurus (nee "Syrmosaurus") at the museum in Moscow, with me for scale.

That's it for now! What did you share for Museum Week?

Beaty Biodiversity Museum

The Canadian Paleontology Conference I attended over the weekend was held at the University of British Columbia campus in Vancouver, and the public lecture, talks, posters, and banquet were all held in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum.

The museum is actually mostly underground, but the ground-level glass atrium is definitely eye-catching! Inside is a suspended skeleton of a 150-foot blue whale, Balaenoptera musculus. It's particularly striking at night.

Once inside, you can view the skeleton from pretty much every angle except dorsally; a ramp runs on the right lateral side down to the galleries. At the end of the talks, we dined on salmon at tables under the whale!

UBC is doing some really innovative things with regards to museums and collections. The Museum of Anthropology, which I visited last year, was the first to renovate its gallery space to include the entire collection. The Biodiversity Museum has followed suit, and the exhibits sit within the collections! It's a pretty good way to kill two birds with one stone, and is a space-efficient (and I'm assuming cost-efficient) way to display specimens. Every few feet one of the storage cabinets has been converted into a display case, and there are a few strategically-placed gaps in the rows to allow for some different display cases. The cases in the middle of this photo had displays about how specimens are collected, and you could pull out the drawers to see more specimens. There were also a couple of interactive kiosks, my favourite being the display about algae. The table had two shopping baskets and a variety of packaged food products; the goal was to separate out the food that had algae in it and the food that didn't (spoiler alert: all but one product had some sort of algae in it!). It was a cool way to teach people about these unappreciated organisms!

What's also great about the museum is that it features all kinds of interesting organisms. The displays include mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, lots of different invertebrates, plants, fungi, and fossils. I really liked the way fossils were incorporated into the exhibits - in the appropriate region of the collection, glass floor panels showed the fossils 'in the ground', like this school of fish from the Green River Formation.

I'm cheating here because this photo is not from the biodiversity museum, but from the Pacific Museum of the Earth (in the Department of Earth & Ocean Sciences) across the street. I had to put it in, because it reminds me how Alberta dinosaurs wind up everywhere. This Lambeosaurus was collected from Dinosaur Provincial Park by the Sternbergs in the 1920s, and is on permanent loan from the Canadian Museum of Nature (and yes, it's real, not a cast).