Beaty Biodiversity Museum opens doors at UBC this weekend
A new museum featuring Canada’s largest blue whale skeleton will open to the public on Saturday (October 16) at the University of British Columbia.
The Beaty Biodiversity Museum, the latest addition to the Point Grey campus, has a theatre and 20,000 square feet of exhibits, which pull from UBC’s natural history collections of over two million plant, fungi, and animal specimens.
It’s currently showing the Flora of British Columbia exhibit, a look at the UBC Herbarium’s collection.
The museum is located in the Beaty Biodiversity Centre (2212 Main Mall).
It will generally be open from Wednesday to Sunday, between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Admission costs $12 for adults, $10 for youths (13 to 17 years old) and seniors, and $8 for kids (5 to 12 years old). UBC faculty, staff, and students get in free.
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Comments
2 Comments
Michelle Ly
Oct 18, 2010 at 10:06pm
As a former volunteer (back when the collections were housed in the old biology building!) I had been looking forward to this for years! The previews were tantalizing at best - the real thing is so much better. Would encourage everyone to take a look at the history and diversity housed in that building.
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Lisa Miller
Nov 4, 2010 at 1:36pm
Apart from the whale display we were not impressed. I would hardly call this a museum. I'd rather refer to it as a huge storage area. The colour scheme is uninviting. The display units are too dark. When I realized that it was much set up like a library and we had to walk through the rows of storage units, I thought that they must be kidding. The museum is not finished yet, but the displays are really sparse. Only one display of insects (beatles). None of mushrooms, for example. Explanations to the displays are not great either. Some more photographs accompanying the various skulls on display would be helpful. They have installed a few 'tray' displays, but really they are too few. It feels like walking through a mausoleum (underground, dead animals). Biodiversity to me calls up something more colourful, alive. In addition, there are no interactive displays. The children's area is not great and decorated with Ikea furniture. The walls are of the unfinished, cement type and could use some banners to bring a touch of colour to the museum. Lighting is dismal. I have visited at least a hundred museums in the world; I have taken some museum studies at university. I would give it a C+. It pales with Naturalis in Leiden, for example. The whale skeleton can be seen from the outside. I would have saved my money had I known it was so uninviting. What a contrast to the Museum of Anthropology.