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The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is Vancouver’s natural history museum, dedicated to creating a shared sense of community and wonder. The museum puts UBC's natural history collections, with more than two million specimens, on public view for the first time. Among our treasures are a 26-metre-long blue whale skeleton suspended in the Djavad Mowafaghian Atrium, the third-largest fish collection in the nation, and myriad fossils, shells, insects, fungi, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and plants from around British Columbia and the world.Come visit us - we’re located at 2212 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC. You can find more info at |
To study extreme biodiversity, researchers have adapted in extreme ways! Biodiversity researchers are as diverse as the organisms they study, and so are their study methods.
Until November, discover the research done by Jedediah Brodie and Simon Donner at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. In Borneo, Jedediah is concerned about the Sunda Clouded Leopard, a wide-ranging cat species. By discovering the conservation needs of this cat, he hopes to help other species in the process. In Kiribati, Simon is trying to untangle how coral reefs will react to climate change. He is using weather patterns to help detect potential consequences of climate change by measuring temperature and coral bleaching.
Check out the lab for research equipment, stories, specimens, and more. You’ll also get a chance to step into their shoes and try out one or two of their research techniques!
Extreme Adaptations
As humans, we are drawn to the extreme – the grotesque, exciting, adorable, implausible and incredible. Organisms on this earth are equipped with extreme adaptations, capable of achieving amazing feats, while inhabiting and surviving in the seemingly impossible.
The diversity of life encompass the unfathomably small and incredibly giant, along with everything in between. Size isn’t the only extreme: every organism on our planet is adapted to survive and exploit the world around it. There are extreme and fascinating examples from every branch on the tree of life. What are these extreme adaptations? How do they arise? How do we study them in extreme parts of the earth? At the museum, we will help satiate your extreme curiosity about the world around you.
Our current museum programming features:
- Museum Tours: let us guide you through extreme organisms throughout our collections
- Discovery Lab: learn about two extreme biodiversity researchers from UBC. How do they adapt to extreme environments to study extreme animals? Become a scientist and try out their research techniques.
- Crafts: make your own useful tools for your scientist kit (current research tool: slope meter or soft forceps)
- Extreme Eyes Activity: get up close to the eyeball, an extremely fascinating adaptation. This activity involves a dissection demonstration.
- Extreme Trivia: blow your mind with extremely cool facts about interesting organisms
- Puppet Show: meet the blue whale's biggest fan and help her discover other extreme organisms that might be her new favourite
- New scavenger hunts
- And more!
For more information on Extreme Adaptations at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, .
