Canadian Museum of Nature
National natural history museum in the 1912 Victoria Memorial Museum Building, with a glass lantern tower
The Canadian Museum of Nature is Canada's national museum of natural history and natural sciences, holding some 14.6 million specimens. Its origins lie in the natural history collections of the Geological Survey of Canada, and it moved in 1912 into the Victoria Memorial Museum Building, a Tudor-Gothic pile of Ontario sandstone designed by the chief Dominion architect David Ewart. The building briefly housed Parliament after the fire of 1916, and its original tower was removed in 1915 after the ground beneath it settled.
Between 2004 and 2010 the building was closed in stages for a thorough renewal, which added the Queens' Lantern, a glass and steel tower on the site of the lost stone one, along with new galleries and a rear wing. Eight permanent galleries cover fossils, birds, mammals, the Arctic, water, the earth, live insects and a Pacific tank; the Fossil Gallery displays dinosaurs collected in Alberta. The research and collections facility in nearby Gatineau opens to the public one day a year.
Highlights
- Tudor-Gothic sandstone building of 1912 by David Ewart
- Queens' Lantern glass tower added in the 2010 renewal
- Fossil Gallery with Albertan dinosaur skeletons
- Arctic Gallery and the live Bugs Alive and Pacific tank displays
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