Museum of Nature holds open house in Gatineau
By Brandi Awad
The Canadian Museum of Nature recently held its annual, one-day-only open house at its research and collections facility in Gatineau.
This Oct. 14 event gave the public a peek into the driving force behind the research and exhibition mandates of the McLeod Street natural history centre.
Stocked with rooms that were full of massive dinosaur skulls, walls of antlers, sparkling minerals and meteorites, the warehouse-like building drew thousands of people keen to see treasured pieces of scientific history.
Guests also had the opportunity to visit different laboratories, including a DNA lab, wet labs used to study aquatic life, heavy prep labs used to examine fossils, an X-ray lab, and a conservation lab that museum scientists use every day to conduct research.
According to Dr. Mark Graham, vice-president of research and collections, lessthan one per cent of the entire collection — which totals more than 14 million specimens — is actually displayed in the Centretown museum.
“When you have a public building, you’re only able to show a very, very small amount of what you actually have in your collections. There’s only about two or three thousand specimens on display in the museum downtown — the best ones, the things that tell the best stories,” he said. “But if you want people to get a sense of just how huge your collection is and the great variety of things, you have to have an open house like this.”
He added: “A lot of people don’t even realize this building exists. They see the museum and think that’s it.”
The museum first opened the doors to its research and collections facility in 1997. Prior to that, the collection and associated research labs were scattered across the national capital region until consolidated into the single, gigantic workspace — an area equivalent in size to five NHL hockey rinks.
Museum officials began inviting the public in 10 years ago as a bi-annual event. However, in 2013, they decided to make it an annual open house due to its rising popularity.
The museum’s efforts to welcome the public hasn’t gone unnoticed by professional colleagues around the world. Among the open house visitors were employees of the Swedish Natural History Museum in Stockholm.
“We have three people visiting us from the national museum in Sweden today. When I told them we were having this open house, they were like, ‘Oh my god, we should be doing that,’ so they’re here today to watch what happens,” Graham said. “They couldn’t believe it, that we would let the public walk into our collections like this.”
Cathy Stewart, who went to the open house with her mother, said she was impressed by the event.
“There’s so much and it’s so interesting,” Stewart said. “The staff and the volunteers are just so knowledgeable, which is wonderful because if you have a question you can ask it and know that you’re going to get an answer to it.”
Dan Smythe, the museum’s media relations director, said events like the open house give the public a platform to discover.
“Here, you get a very first-hand account of the biodiversity that exists in Canada — plants, animals, fossils, minerals — not only in the present, but in the past, and you learn why that’s important. You learn that when you talk to the scientists and hear about the things they study, how they use the collections and the knowledge that they gained from them. That’s what this day is all about.”