December 2014

Monthly Archive: December 2014

A Spotlight on Illegal Pelt Trading, and What the ROM Has to Do With It

Posted: December 25, 2014 - 17:03 , by ROM
Tags on confiscated furs within the ROM Collections. Photo by Matt Jenkins

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

Posted: December 16, 2014 - 11:31 , by ROM
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Grasshopper

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

Posted: December 5, 2014 - 12:35 , by ROM
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Road Ecology experts stand with bright fluorescent safety vests next to Terry Fox Drive in Kanata, Ontario

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

Posted: December 2, 2014 - 14:38 , by ROM
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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.

Remembering Allan Baker

Posted: December 2, 2014 - 12:29 , by Cathy Dutton
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Allan Baker

Allan John Baker (1943 - 2014) was hired by the ROM as Assistant Curator of Ornithology in 1972. He became Associate Curator and Head of the Ornithology Department in 1976, and was promoted to full Curator in 1981. In 1995, he became head of the ROM’s newly established Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology, and subsequently became head of the Department of Natural History in 2004.

The Monastery of St Moses, Syria: The Prehistoric Remains

Posted: December 1, 2014 - 08:52 , by Robert Mason
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The largest corbelled structure, in fact a complex of three (Feature 56 - 58), with the Qalamoun mountains in the background.

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.