Instead of being a giant Greek Revival building full of dead exhibits, Halifax‘s Museum of Natural History comes alive with staff introducing visitors to live specimens of non-native animals. I also appreciated the prehistoric exhibit told through the lens of Nova Scotia’s indigenous people.
Reptiles are cheap to buy and easy to keep, so there are a lot of frogs and snakes. But this museum’s approach is a little different. Staff let visitors know which ones just had a miscarriage and which have just grown from ringworm to beetle. They keep the skin and non-viable eggs that the animals leave behind and preserve them to tell the story about their life cycle.
The mastodon skeleton was a refreshing breath of transparency. The museum reveal that it was actually a cast from several different mastodon remains that represented the size of a partial mastodon skeleton recovered in a Nova Scotia mine.
The rest of the museum has a uniquely maritime theme. Many of the taxidermy exhibits were birds, fish, or shellfish from the ocean. It even explained that walrus trusts turn black in freshwater only if left there for a very long time, one of the clues to what a location’s geography used to be like.
An hour is more than enough, but the storytelling is worth the visit.
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