News & Stories

Volunteer with the Beaty Biodiversity Museum

The Museum is currently seeking volunteers to fill the roles of Museum Educators and Events Assistants. Museum Educators engage museum visitors in the wonder of biodiversity through a variety of activities, kids programs, museum specimens and storytelling. Events Assistants provide support during a wide range of museum special events, including lectures and evening functions.

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For the Love of Moss

Today, we celebrate the launch of Enciclopedia de la Flora Chilena, an online encyclopaedia of Chile’s diverse plant population that visiting Chilean bryologist Felipe Osorio has worked on for two years. Similar to British Columbia’s E-flora BC, the website provides photos and descriptions of thousands of plant species, all with available distribution, bibliographical, and taxonomic information.

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Revealed! New Display Puts Spotlight on BRC Researchers

The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is pleased to announce a new display, Researchers Revealed. Researchers Revealed features descriptions of six Biodiversity Research Centre (BRC) graduate students and their research projects. The new display panels describe work on migratory birds, tiny plant microfossils and past climates, life in the intertidal zone for small fishes, and other interesting research projects.

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Sea Otters: A Conservation Success Story, or Rats of the Ocean?

After being re-introduced to the north end of Vancouver Island in the 1970s, sea otters can once again be found in many areas from which they were extirpated in the fur trade of the 18th and 19th centuries. From a conservation perspective, this is an important success story, yet events are rarely as black and white as they might appear. How could an animal returning to its natural habitat—the epitome of ‘charismatic megafauna’—be grounds for concern?

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? It also depends on what the pressure is! The “blobfish” (Psychrolutes marcidus) is a distant relative of BC’s own rockfishes and, with apologies to Jimmy Durante who shared a similarly prominent proboscis with this fish, the blobfish was recently voted the world’s “ugliest” animal by The Ugly Animals Preservation Society (UAPS).

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Beaty Museum wins Best of Vancouver award!

The Georgia Straight is into the 18th year of its annual Best of Vancouver award. Their editorial team has spent months on the lookout for good deeds, weird urban details, and various howlers to highlight, and the Beaty Biodiversity Museum is ecstatic to learn that contributors have picked the Museum as one of the winners for Best of Vancouver 2013, under the category of “Best Collection of Weird Things in Drawers”.

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