Royal Ontario Museum Blog
Monthly Archive: December
Douglas Coupland: Everything Man
Artist, writer, thinker
Douglas Coupland is a man of many talents
A mid-Silurian aquatic scorpion – one step closer to land?
Rocks of the 430 million year old Eramosa Formation Konservat-Lagerstätte on the Bruce Peninsula have produced an amazing new species of aquatic fossil scorpions, Eramoscorpius brucensis, which contributes to our understanding of how scorpions may eventually have moved from the sea onto land.
Of Africa at the ROM. Exploring the complexity of African and Diasporic experience.
The third week of October marked the launch of the three-year multi-platform project Of Africa: a rich and thought-provoking series of talks and performances entitled Histories, Collections, Reflections.
In the Shadow of the Volcano: The Discovery of Pompeii
In 79 CE Mount Vesuvius erupted violently. Pliny the Younger, in his eye-witness account of the event, describes earthquakes, towering plumes of hot ash, and skies filled with fire.
A Spotlight on Illegal Pelt Trading, and What the ROM Has to Do With It
Guest blog post by Environmental Visual Communication alumnus Matt Jenkins.
Celebrating its centennial birthday this year, the ROM has always stood as a place of education, family enjoyment and research. That is why I found it surprising that the ROM identifies nearly one quarter of its roughly one thousand pelts as ‘seized’ or illegal. Fear not though, as I learned, they are at the museum with the proper permits and have actually played integral roles in assisting the prevention of illegal pelt trading.
Beautiful Bugs! A New Acquisition
The ROM Library has recently acquired an edition of E. A. Séguy’s Insects, published in the 1920s. The book contains highly coloured and detailed full-page illustrations of insects, executed in the expensive pochoir printing technique favoured at this time.
Roads, Roads, Roads - Road Ecology in Canada
November 27-28 brought 110 of the top Canadian road ecology minds together for a conference in Ottawa that started the conversation about this emerging science at a national scale.
The Wildlife Photographer of Yesteryear
The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is celebrating its 50th year, and the exhibition showing this year's outstanding images of the natural world opened at the ROM last week. Wildlife photography has a history nearly as long as the medium itself.
The Monastery of St Moses, Syria: The Prehistoric Remains
Since 2004 I had walked the Qalamoun mountains around the monastery of Deir Mar Musa looking for archaeological features to record. In all that time I found one lithic, a stone tool from humanity’s prehistoric past. My colleagues back home that specialised in these objects would say that I just didn’t know what I was looking for. In the last days of the 2009 season, what turned out to be my last season at the monastery, I thought I would reconnoitre the southern part of the field area.
Modern Design for a Modern World: Art Deco in Paris
In the years between the World Wars a new design style emerged which embraced the imagery of industrialization. This style, known as Art Deco, responded to the social and technological developments that had come out of the First World War, and celebrated all things modern.
