Our Science

Welcome to the Canadian Museum of Nature’s Natural Heritage Campus in Gatineau, Quebec in the national capital region. My name is Jeff Saarela. I’m the Vice-President of Research and Collections here at the museum. I invite you to join us. Come on inside, meet some of our scientists, meet our experts, explore our collections, and learn a bit about the 150 years or so of documentation that the museum has been engaged in. We’re now inside the museum’s Natural Heritage Campus. The building includes an administration wing, library, and at the end of this hallway, behind the doors, is the museum’s collection and laboratory wing.   Oh, and in case you’re wondering, this is a mastodon not a mammoth. We are now in the research and collections wing on the Natural Heritage Campus. On the right, along this long corridor, is the museum’s national natural history collection. Behind these walls are about 14.6 million natural history specimens. We’ve got material from across the tree of life and across the geological diversity of the planet. So the museum has specimens of fishes, of plants, of lichens, of algae,  of dinosaurs, of rocks of minerals and gems, of birds, of mammals, of invertebrates that live on the ocean and on the land. The museum’s collection has been growing for over a century and of course it’s still growing now. We bring in about 20,000 new specimens per year. On the left side of me is the collections processing workspaces and scientific laboratories where new material that’s coming into the museum gets processed, gets acquired. This is a huge space. 14.6 million specimens are stored in an area that’s about the size of five professional hockey rinks. The museum’s collection grows by about 20,000 new specimens per year. Material comes to the museum from research conducted by museum staff, by gift, or exchange with other museums or university collections, by donations, from external collectors, and other means. So the biggest risks to a collection of natural history objects are natural disasters like tornadoes or earthquakes. But also pests – pests that like to eat museum specimens. So every new specimen that comes into the museum, before it gets into the area where the material is processed and where the material gets into the permanent collection, has to come through a pest control area. So everything that comes in has to be frozen for five days at minus 20 degrees Celsius. We’ve got three large freezers and if you look inside this freezer you can see a lot of incoming material that is currently being frozen at -20 before it can go into the collection area and after five days at -20 any pests or insect eggs or other insect activity is basically killed and then the material is safe to bring into the rest of the collection.I’m now at the back of the research and collections wing at the museum and I’m in a long corridor that spans the width of the facility. This wall is an outside wall and this wall borders the 42 rooms that store the museum’s collections. This corridor provides protection from pests so it minimizes the opportunities for insects to get from the outside to the inside and it also helps moderate the climate to keep the collections in the 42 collection rooms at a stable temperature. Each of the 42 collection storage spaces in the museum are climate controlled and this is to allow us to monitor, to maintain tight pest control so we can control the temperature and the humidity in each space. Bugs don’t like cool temperatures and high humidity. So here in the fur vault, the temperature is a cool 10 degrees Celsius to keep the bugs under control. So there’s several rooms in the museum that have specialized security systems built in to protect both the health and safety of the staff and also to protect the integrity of the specimens. This room is one of three rooms that stores mollusc specimens and they are stored in glass jars in 70 percent alcohol which is flammable. So in this room there’s specialized equipment to detect vapors so gas vapors in the air if the vapor, so ethanol, gets too high there may be risk of an explosion. The sensor detects it to alert that there’s a problem. There’s also a system to absorb static electricity in the room. Again, a spark could potentially cause a jar of ethanol to explode. That’s a quick overview of the facility here at the Natural Heritage Campus. Stick around for the upcoming videos from our research and collections experts to learn moreas part of our virtual open house here at the Canadian Museum of Nature.