Children climb around in a chimpanzee nest at the Museum of Nature’s newest exhibit.
Visitors to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Centretown need only take a few steps to leave Ottawa's snowy streets for the lush jungles of Tanzania.
The museum’s newest exhibit, called Discovering Chimpanzees: The Remarkable World of Jane Goodall, transports visitors to Gombe National Park in eastern Africa.
“As soon as I walked in, I got the feel of being in the rainforest,” says Barbara Cartwright, who works with the Jane Goodall Institute. She should know.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa with chimpanzees in the forest, and this is an opportunity to get that feeling if you haven’t had the chance to go there.”
The exhibit, which opened at the end of January, is inspired by the work of legendary observational biologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall, who has spent more than 40 years observing chimpanzees and spearheading conservation efforts worldwide.
Visitors to the exhibit can learn what it’s like to be a chimpanzee by digging for imaginary termites, climbing into a chimpanzee nest and taking pictures with life-sized cut-outs of various primates.
They can also visit a replica of Goodall’s tent in Gombe National Park and read about what they can do to stop chimpanzees and other primates from going extinct.
“Many people don’t know that great apes are critically endangered and we could lose them within the next 50 years, some of them in the next 10 years,” says Cartwright. “An exhibit like this gets the message out that Dr. Goodall has worked for more than 40 years to try and reach people with.”
Goodall’s message is evident throughout the entire exhibit. Along a back wall, visitors can hear a message from a holographic video of Goodall, who celebrates the “indomitable” human spirit and insists that “every single one of us needs to leave lighter footprints on this Earth.”
The exhibit was the brainchild of Science North, which developed it with the help of the Jane Goodall Institute in 2002, based on an IMAX film about gorillas.
Since then, the exhibit has travelled across Canada and the United States, but the Museum of Nature is its first stop this year.
That, according to museum exhibit co-ordinator Carol Thiessen, is “very fortuitous.”
The United Nations has declared 2009 the Year of the Gorilla, which “works really well from the perspective of bringing in an extra message of conservation,” she says.
According to the United Nations Environment Programme website, the Year of the Gorilla is a campaign “aimed at improving conservation of humankind’s closest relatives and their habitats.”
Goodall has been declared a patron for the Year of the Gorilla, says the website.
Jennifer Pink, who worked with Goodall in the development of the exhibit at the Science North centre in Sudbury, says she hopes that Goodall’s influence, both on the museum’s exhibit and the Year of the Gorilla, will speak for itself.
“Dr. Goodall is a very well-known and well-spoken scientific personality,” she says. “She has a rock star kind of appeal.”
The rock star herself will be visiting Ottawa in April, when she will be speaking at Centrepointe Theatre.