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.
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.
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?
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).
Fashion Blogger Colleen Tsoukalas wrote about Ivan Sayers’ last artist talk as part of the museum’s last exhibition, INVOKING VENUS, Feathers and Fashion.
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”.
The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is excited to launch its newest temporary exhibition today. Titled Invisible Portraits, this visual art exhibition reveals the secret world of microbes through high-tech images of microbial life refashioned as metal sculpture, wood carvings and large-scale portraiture by Kevin Carpenter, Erick James and Patrick Keeling.
On October 8, 2013, the Beaty Biodiversity Museum was featured on CityTV’s Breakfast Television. If you have missed it, you can still watch the segments by clicking through.
As part of the INVOKING VENUS, Feathers and Fashion exhibition at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, Fashion historian Ivan Sayers has given an artist talk on the use of animal products in historical western fashion and featured items from the collections of Ivan Sayers and Claus Jahnke. Watch the video here.
Vancouver’s rat population is growing and no neighbourhood is immune to the rodents and their pesky and dirty ways. Dr. Rana Sarfraz, a UBC ecologist and expert on pests, said that Vancouver’s rat problem has been getting worse in recent years and it’s not limited to the downtown core.
