Ottawa's Museum of Nature

Thursday evenings are supposedly "museum nights" here in Ottawa and they are free during this time of the week. So, after 16:00, many of the course participants packed up for the day and headed out to the Museum of Nature.

The entrance. The building from the outside looks like a castle.

The first exhibit we went to was the "Animalium", which is one of the two parts of the museum with live animals (i.e. spiders, insects, fishes).

Very cool-looking Sunburst Diving Beetle (Thermonectus marmoratus).


A museum (especially one about nature) can't be a museum without dinosaurs! The first feathered dinosaur.


Since I am studying pollinators, I can't resist taking a photo of this.



My favorite dinosaur - Triceratops sp.


Never knew about this animal before.


I love rhinos too, especially its ancestors!


I studied bats before, so I can't help taking photo of a stuffed bat.


"Stuffed" Pronghorns (Antilocapra americana), one of the animals that I always want to see in the wild.


Eastern Loggerhead Shrike, another animal I have studied.



The Bird Gallery is "stuffed" with birds, literally. Although I like this one above (and the shrike one) because it shows the size differences among (left to right): male Sharp-shinned Hawk, female SSHA, male Cooper's Hawk, and female COHA.


Took a picture of this stuffed Horned Grebe, another animal that I wanted to see.


Live fish!

Then there was this photo gallery exhibit of researches being done in the Arctic, which I thought was totally appropriate to me since I just did one summer of field work up north.

The top right photo looks similar to this one I took of one of the volunteers.

It feels nice to be able to recognize all of the flowers by sight.

Overall, the museum is not bad. It seems to be geared towards children and school programs, but since it was free, I can't complain. Plus, I had fun looking at the animals and images familiar to me.