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The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is Vancouver’s natural history museum,
dedicated to creating a shared sense of community and wonder.
Explore the amazing diversity of life: 20,000 square feet of exhibits, visit the
Allan Yap Teaching Lab, and stare through the jaws of the largest creature ever
to live on Earth—the blue whale.
Among our natural history collections treasures are a 26-metre-long blue whale
skeleton suspended in the Djavad Mowafaghian Atrium, the third-largest fish
collection in the nation, and myriad fossils, shells, insects, fungi, mammals, birds,
reptiles, amphibians, and plants from around British Columbia and the world.
Through exhibits, hands-on activities, educators’ resources, public presentations,
and community and cultural engagement, we are working to increase
understanding of the interconnectedness and relevance of all life on Earth. We
offer a unique combination of world-class, UBC-based research at the adjacent
Biodiversity Research Centre and beautiful, compelling accessible public exhibits.
Visit the Museum:
 Explore over 20,000 square feet of collections and exhibits.
 Participate in activities designed for visitors of all ages.
 Interact with the specimens in our teaching lab, find out how researchers
use the collection.
 Watch films celebrating biodiversity.
 View the largest blue whale skeleton on display in Canada.
 Visit the Niche Café
 Visit the Museum Store
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Biodiversity
Humanity is embedded in a biodiverse world.
The Beaty Biodiversity Museum works to illuminate how biodiversity evolved,
how it is maintained, why it matters to humans, and how we can conserve it. The
museum seeks to nurture the sense of wonder that many--especially youth--feel
in experiencing biodiversity in hopes that they choose to preserve it as citizens,
and perhaps even study it as scientists.
Science studies life's diversity in order to understand common principles
underlying the biology of all species, to understand how our ecosystems came to
be and how they function, and to learn how to act sustainably. Since the early
20th century, biologists at UBC have archived specimens of the many species
they have studied in our natural history collections. These specimens, over two
million to date, hold precious information about species and ecosystems of the
past and present, and are guarded as time capsules sent to biologists centuries
into the future. During these past decades our effort has grown, making UBC one
of the world's leading universities in biodiversity research. But those decades
have also seen biodiversity, and humanity's future, ever more imperilled.
The museum's world-class researchers, curators, and dedicated and creative
outreach staff all work toward celebrating human responses to biodiversity,
including art, culture, and our own love for biodiversity. At its core, the museum is
designed to spread enthusiasm by revealing the amazing stories and beauty of
biodiversity.
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History of the Museum
The Collections
The biological collections that are the centrepiece of the Beaty Biodiversity
Museum were each started by a different collector, some as early as the 1910s.
Over the decades, the collections were added to by myriad researchers, and
grew to contain over 2 million specimens. In 2001, researchers at the Biodiversity
Research Centre and within the departments of Botany and Zoology envisioned
a building that would facilitate interdisciplinary work on biodiversity, house UBC's
biodiversity researchers and collections, and contain a public natural history
museum.
For years, Ross Beaty envisioned a museum of natural history in British
Columbia, a community asset that would profile the amazing wonders of the
natural world, in one of the most species-rich places on earth. Ross and Trisha
Beaty, UBC alumni, demonstrated inspirational vision and foresight through an
exceptional leadership gift which enabled UBC create a museum in which the
collections are available for the public to view.
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Cowan Tetrapod Collection
The Cowan Tetrapod Collection’s over 40,000 specimens of mammals, birds,
amphibians, and reptiles represent every continent on Earth, with most coming
from western Canada.
The Herbarium
Herbaria provide a permanent record of our changing flora over time,
documenting all plant species discovered so far, their variation, and their past
and present distributions. They hold a treasure trove of anatomical, chemical,
ethnobotanical, and molecular information, and document the history of plant
exploration.
The Herbarium is the largest collection of dried plant and fungi specimens in
western Canada, with more than 660,000 specimens. The world’s largest
collection of BC plants and Canada’s largest collection of bryophytes are housed
in the Herbarium.
Spencer Entomological Collection
The Spencer Entomological Collection is the second largest collection in Western
Canada, holding over 600,000 specimens that highlight the diversity of British
Columbia's insects and other arthropods, as well as jumping spiders from around
the world.
The Fish Museum
The Fish Collection boasts over 800,000 specimens, with particularly spectacular
and important holdings from Canada, the Aleutians, the Malay Archipelago,
Mexico, the Galapagos, Panama, and the Amazon.
Marine Invertebrate Collection
The Marine Invertebrate Collection contains thousands of specimens
representing the major lineages of animals, such as cnidarians, molluscs,
annelids, crustaceans, echinoderms, and sponges.
Fossil Collection
The Fossil Collection contains over 20,000 specimens that range from recent
shells to 500-million-year old fossils of blue-green algae, as well as specimens
from British Columbia’s famous Burgess Shale.
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Research
The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is part of UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Centre,
bringing the University’s world-class biodiversity researchers and natural history
collections together into an innovative building complex.
The Biodiversity Research Centre (BRC) is composed of more than 50
internationally renowned scientists, all dedicated to the study of biodiversity.
Interdisciplinary working groups study the biological forces that produce and
sustain biodiversity, as well as the forces that lead to extinction and the local and
global consequences of its loss.
Scientists at the BRC investigate the ecology, evolution, conservation and
maintenance of biological diversity through research at all levels, from genes to
ecosystems through to interactions with society. As the scope of global climate
change, human-caused habitat alterations, and associated extinction rates rise,
the need to understand and conserve biodiversity and the ecosystem functions
that it sustains has never been more pressing.
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The Blue Whale Exhibit
The Beaty Biodiversity Museum is home to Canada's largest blue whale
skeleton, a magnificent exhibit that illustrates the interconnectedness of all living
things. Blue whales are the largest animal ever to have lived on earth. They
rarely strand on beaches, and very few skeletons have been recovered for
research or display. Worldwide, only 21 are available to the public for viewing.
On the remote northwestern coast of PEI in 1987, a 26 m long mature female
blue whale died and washed ashore near the town of Tignish. In hopes of
preserving the whale's skeleton for research or museum display, the PEI
government and the Canadian Museum of Nature arranged for the skeleton to be
dragged off the beach near Nail Pond, and buried. The remains of the whale
were longer than two Vancouver trolley buses parked one behind the other, and
weighed an estimated 80,000 kg. Her burial was a mammoth task.
Because of the difficulty of unearthing and displaying such a large animal, the
whale skeleton remained under the red PEI dirt for two decades. The process of
retrieving, degreasing, repairing and articulating it began in 2007 and the
installation in the Beaty Biodiversity Museum was completed in May 2010.
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Visiting the Museum
Current hours and events: www.beatymuseum.ubc.ca/
Individual Admission:
Adult: $12
Senior, non-UBC student (with ID) and youth (13–17): $10
Child (5–12 years) Must be accompanied by an adult: $8
Family: $35
UBC Alumni (with Alumni Card): 2 for 1
Child (under 5 years, accompanied by an adult): Free
UBC faculty, staff, or student (with ID): Free
GROUPS: 10 OR MORE, SELF-GUIDED, PRICES INCLUDE TAXES
Group Admission:
Adult: $10
Senior, non-UBC student (with ID) and youth (13–17 years): $9
Child (5–12 years): $7
Museums and Gardens Pass
Includes: Museum of Anthropology (MOA), UBC Botanical Garden, Nitobe
Garden, and Beaty Biodiversity Museum
Adult: $33
Youth/Student/Senior 65+: $28 Youth/Student/Senior 65+;
Family (2 adults and up to 4 children under 18): $85
Also receive 20% savings on UBC Bookstore books, clothing, and gifts, 15%
savings on food items purchased at Café MOA and the Beaty Museum's Niche
Cafe, AND 10% savings on admission to the Greenheart Forest Canopy
Walkway! Passports are valid for 6 months, and may be purchased NOW at the
Beaty Museum, MOA, Nitobe Garden, and UBC Botanical Garden-- your
passport to adventure at UBC. Get yours today!
Beaty Biodiversity Museum
University of British Columbia
2212 Main Mall
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4
F: 604.827.5350
E: info@beatymuseum.ubc.ca
P: 604.827.4955
INDIVIDUAL ADMISSION: PRICES INCLUDE TAXES