AT THE MUSEUMS
The Royal Ontario Museum ( ROM) in Toronto has launched a major new permanent exhibit, Dawn of Life, in its first new gallery space to open in a decade. The Willner Madge Gallery is home to the exhibit that traces the history of life on Earth from early microbes to the period when dinosaurs and mammals arose. The ROM is deeply involved with paleontology research, and nearly a thousand fossils are part of Dawn of Life, including specimens from UNESCO World Heritage Sites across Canada. Those specimens include a four- billion-year- old banded iron formation from Inukjuak, Quebec, that has tubes made by microbes and is the earliest known evidence of life; billion-year- old stromatolites from the Northwest Territories and Ontario; fossils of multicellular life from the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve in Newfoundland and Labrador; tree-like stumps from the Joggins Fossil Cliffs in Nova Scotia; a 226- million-yearold ichthyosaur from British Columbia; and trilobite fossils from across Canada and around the world. Nearly two hundred fossils come from the Burgess Shale, in British Columbia’s Yoho and Kootenay national parks, an area renowned for the diversity of soft- bodied life forms that are preserved as fossils. A fifteen- metre-wide video display portrays how that ecosystem may have looked half a billion years ago, while large murals, touchable models, and an interactive game add to the experience for visitors.
A new long-term exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver explores the city’s relationships to forests and the natural environment. That
Which Sustains Us was created by a curatorial collective that included Musqueam, Squamish, and Tseil-Waututh cultural experts as well as environmental historians and forestry researchers. The curators were supported by specialists in climate change, water quality, and biodiversity, and the exhibition was designed by architects Chad Manley and Daniel Irving, who used a variety of wood and paper elements to highlight the importance of forest resources in daily life. For instance, the intricate Movement display utilizes innovative woodworking techniques while touching upon themes of resettlement, land clearing, and immigration. It includes a vessel shaped on one end as a Salish canoe and on the other as a whale’s tale, while paper wings that hang above it evoke a dragonfly.