Canadian Museum of Nature

The Canadian Museum of Nature ( French Musée Canadien de la Nature ) is a state natural history museum in Ottawa ( McLeod Street 240). The museum is also research institute.

It was created in 1856 from the collections of the Geological Survey of Canada. The museum building was built 1905-1912 in neo-Gothic style by the architect David Ewart (Victoria Memorial Museum Building ). The corresponding tower had but because founded on unstable nonswelling be demolished in 1915. 1968 Ethnological collection from the original National Museum separated (Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau ) and which has now become the National Museum of Natural Sciences was later renamed the Canadian Museum of Nature. 2004 to 2010, the museum was thoroughly renovated, including a glass building ( Queen's Lantern) above the entrance.

The museum houses (2010) over 10 million exhibition and collection pieces. They have extensive zoological and botanical collections with reference, for example, 125,000 pieces of collection of 2600 species in the bird collection. The mineral and rock collection is one of the oldest of the museum with more than 52,000 copies.

They have a rich dinosaur collection with over 300 exhibits, three quarters of the originals. The dinosaurs come mainly from Canada, where very rich sites were disrupted, as well as much from China. Among the exhibited dinosaurs are also rare specimens like the Tyrannosaurus -like Daspletosaurus, the ceratopsians from the Late Cretaceous of Canada and the Chasmosaurus Sinornithosaurus, a small feathered carnivorous dinosaurs of the Early Cretaceous of China. On display are also the great Cretaceous sea turtle Archelon and the early whale Ambulocetus. From the dinosaur department performs a Extinction Gallery ( in the mass extinction is represented by meteorite impact on the border Cretaceous / Tertiary ) in the mammalian range.

Attached is a library with 43,000 books and 100,000 journal volumes (2010).