Gallery of Ancient Greece, ROM photo source : Lorie Pierce
I admire model makers. They allow museums to show more than what will fit into a display case. They provide context for other objects and help explore the rich culture of ancient civilizations, as if those settlements had sprung to life again in miniature form.
Sylvia Alice Earle is an American marine biologist, explorer, author, and lecturer. Since 1998 she has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. source : wikipedia
This map shows were humans live on this planet.
Each colour accounts for one billion people.
photo source : Chris Hadfield twitter site
deer carving on tomb photo source : Lorie Pierce
This gorgeous carving is one of the features on a wall of Chinese tomb panels located near the entrance to the museum’s volunteer centre. More deer images frolic nearby on a tomb gate and one hundred of them grace a ceramic vase.
Recently a newly described species of bat was named for our Natural History curator and researcher, Burton Lim. It is a yellow-shouldered bat much like this one.
Sturnira tildae bat photo source : Burton Lim, ROM image 5372
Scientists at Chicago‘s Field Museum and New York‘s American Museum of Natural History have discovered three new species of yellow-shouldered bats, genusSturnira, in the Neotropics. Wednesday, an open-access journal ZooKeys published their paper on two of the new species, Sturnira bakeri and Sturnira burtonlimi. The two new species were previously confused with S. ludovici, and S. lilium and S. luisi, respectively. With the discovery, genus Sturnira now has the most species of any genus in family Phyllostomidae, the leaf-nosed bats.
Species S. bakeri was named after Dr. Robert J. Baker, who “has made enormous contributions to our [Authors of the ZooKey paper] understanding of bats, particularly to the evolution of Neotropical phyllostomids”; and S. burtonlimi after Dr. Burton K. Lim, who “collected the type series of this species and has made many other important collections throughout the Neotropics and beyond”, the authors noted in the paper.
Before this, Burton had a cartoon bat named for him in a children’s book.
Burton & Isabelle Pipistrelle book Photo source : ROM
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the museum, curatorial staff were asked to choose their favourite artifact from the collections and then explain why they made that choice. This the third in a series originally published in The Toronto Star.
fossil bat photo source : ROM images
Onychonycteris finneyi fossil bat, Reed Gallery of the Age of Mammals
Chosen by: Kevin Seymour
Assistant Curator/Collections Manager (Vertebrate Palaeontology), Natural History
This is the world’s most primitive — and oldest — complete fossil bat skeleton. It is my favourite ROM fossil because the details of its anatomy demonstrate to us that bats flew before they could echolocate (use sound to locate and capture food). This is the first fossil bat to show us how bats must have evolved. As well, I was involved in the description of it in 2008.
Kevin Seymour photo source : Lucas Oleniuk, Toronto Star
Sanctacaris fossil, Burgess Shale Formation photo source : ROM images
Chosen by: Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron
Discovered by the ROM on Mount Stephen, B.C., this spectacular fossil is an ancient member of the arthropods, a group of animals that includes modern horseshoe crabs, shrimps and insects. Sanctacaris uncata, as it was named in 1988, lived and died 505 million years ago in a tropical sea now part of the famous Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park. This specimen was uncovered in 1983 by excavating and splitting rock layers. Unfortunately, during the collection process, the back of one part was lost. It was a real fluke when I rediscovered the missing piece in 2007 at the fossil site. Beyond the satisfaction of reuniting pieces of a scientifically important specimen, the missing piece shows that irreparable damage occurred while it was exposed to the elements.
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the opening of the museum, curatorial staff were asked to choose their favourite artifact from the collections and then explain why they made that choice. This the first in a series originally published in The Toronto Star.
This skeleton has been on display for decades, and it still stands as the only known example of this species. What you may not know is that it is the ROM’s global ambassador. Because of its truly bizarre trombone-crested head, it has become a flag-bearer of the fantastic strangeness of dinosaurs. Our Parasaurolophus has been highlighted in hundreds of books, dozens of television documentaries, has appeared on coins and stamps, and made into toys. Casts are on display all over the world, including at the American Museum of Natural History and London’s Natural History Museum, and it has inspired hundreds of millions of people.
David Evans, Vertebrate Palaeontologist, ROM photo source : ROM
Late breaking news !
Just got notice that I have been promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, effective July 1.
Congratulations Dave.
Anomalocaris cake source @echinoblog
Check out the cute trilobites scurrying across this cake to avoid the Anomalocaris. That huge mid-Cambrian marine predator. Invertebrates rule!
Chief Curator, Mark Engstrom photo source : Lucas Oleniuk
Adapted from an article in The Toronto Star online newspaper. By: Murray Whyte Visual arts, Published on Fri Apr 11 2014
ROM chief curator Mark Engstrom is overseeing the massive task of putting all of the millions of objects in the museum’s collection online.
The Royal Ontario Museum is home to some six million objects, ranging from dinosaur bones to Roman sculpture to dessicated bat wings to very specific species of high-altitude mouse from Central America. How do you manage something so huge and so broad? Not easily.
Q: Of that six million, I’m told, about five million are bits and pieces of animals…..
A: That’s right. The majority of those are the research collections, and they’re incredibly important in terms of documenting organisms at a particular place and point in time. For example, all the hard data we have on the movements of animals due to global warming . . . all the actual evidence sits in those drawers. Now the challenge is to get all that data online so people can use it worldwide.
Q: What does that data tell you?
A: Well, in the most general sense, it tells you how much has changed in a relatively short time geologically. Remember, in Toronto, it wasn’t that long ago we were under a kilometre of ice. We’re really in a biological rebound and things are gradually making their way north. The mammal fauna of Toronto, over the last 10,000 years, but particularly the last 300, it’s quite remarkable how much has changed……
Q: The ROM, as a building, is huge. Can you give us an idea of how much of your holdings are actually there for the public to see?
A: There’s probably 30,000 objects on display and it looks like a lot. But there’s six million in the back and that’s a conservative estimate. We’re a research museum, so not a lot of that is eminently displayable. But a lot of it is.
Q: One of the big efforts at the ROM is to gather up all your collections and all the data surrounding them into a single, easy-access database. How far along are you?
A: Well, we talk about six million objects, about a million of which are cultural artifacts. But as I said, that’s conservative. If you go to the invertebrate paleontology collection, the invertebrate fossils are on slabs and there may be 1,000 on a slab. We typically count the slab as one.
The museum used to be composed of 19 departments and 22 major collection areas. And each one of those had its own database. Because they were all doing their own thing and came into the computer age at different times with different angles, they developed their own databases.
We’re now migrating all of that to a universal database that covers the whole museum. And, yes, that takes time. It’s a huge project for us. Right now we have 5,000 images online and I’d like to see two to three million, and soon. The question is, how do we get from here to there? ……
It’s very important to us that people understand what a treasure house this is and how important, nationally and internationally. And no better way than to see for themselves.
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