Beaty Biodiversity Museum Opening Day!

It’s finally here!

The UBC Beaty Biodiversity Museum opened it’s doors today, Oct 16, to the public after a series of tantalizing summer previews.

I was there mid-afternoon and wow, there was a lot to see! Volunteers in red shirts were swarming the area, ready and eager to answer questions from the public. I was gratified to see so many people volunteering for the museum but a part of me was bitter – why did it take UBC so long to bring this museum into the public eye?

The entrance to the museum is the same as during the previews: an awe-inspiring, 360 degree walk around the blue whale skeleton to the lower levels. Once there, rows upon rows of carefully sealed cabinets held the vertebrate, avian, fish, fungi, plant, bug and fossil collections. Each cabinet was labeled with beautiful photographs of the contents, a far cry from the sticker-and-marker approach taken when the specimens were housed in the old Biology building!

And most importantly – the displays!

Many of the specimens that UBC owns were donated from private collections amassed in the 1800s and early 1900s, when it was more popular to have mounted stuffed animals on display. Included in this group are numerous antlered species and a beautiful penguin specimen! More recent specimens are thanks to the diligence of volunteers (like myself in days gone by!) who painstakingly turn dead animals (often road kill or birds who have crashed into glass buildings) into carefully dried and preserved specimens which can be used for teaching, display and research.

Now, interspersed between the cabinets, these specimens are proudly on display. Mounted birds, jars of fish, carefully pressed plants and even fossils, embedded into the floor – all this, and more!

Many activities were running during opening day, including cake cutting, a presentation from Dr. Wayne Maddison, and a scavenger hunt that earned participants a pin to take home.

For myself, my favourite activity was the craft station, where participants were asked to write a message on a maple leaf shaped piece of construction paper. The messages would adorn a wall in the far end of the museum. I dedicated my leaf to the late Dr. Rex Kenner, who worked tirelessly in the museum, maintaining the collections year after year, with UBC cutting the budget, limiting work hours, and generally being the pain in the ass bureaucracy that it is. My leaf read: “For Rex Kenner – It’s finally open!”.