Willner Madge Dawn of Life Gallery at the Royal Ontario Museum: Review
After a week-long delay, I finally went to the Royal Ontario Museum to visit a new exhibit, once on Dec. 12 and the next on 19th. While the museum already has galleries for fossil fauna of the Mesozoic era and the Cenozoic era, for the longest time it had no gallery for the Paleozoic before either of them. Shame, as the museum has a pretty good collection, especially from the Burgess Shale in BC, easily one of the most iconic fossil deposits ever. Fortunately, over the course of the last decade the ROM has worked to rectify this. Taking an old event space on the second floor, it has turned it into the Willner Madge Dawn of Life Gallery.
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| this is what it was before |
The exhibit starts off with a round space introducing the concepts of the exhibit, with at its center a skull of the armoured fish Dunkleosteus and other fossils along the walls, such as trilobites, ancient plants, and most notably on the wall a giant cast of the floor of Newfoundland's Mistaken Point, and highlighting the main points of the exhibit through breakthroughs in evolution.
The first displays highlight the origin of all life, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA (heh heh).
Parallel on the wall are the first true fossils, stromalites, as a video on them plays. The next focuses on both the snowball earth period, and Edicarian life, like those at Mistaken Point. Then come life of the Cambrian, using models to draw visitors' attention.
On the other side is an entire section for the Burgess Shale in BC, which if you no anything about its fossils, is well-earned. It starts with a case of artefacts from previous digs for it and the most famous creature from it, Anamolocaris, and a showcase of studying them, as well as a case for the recently discovered relative of Anomalocaris, Titanokorys gainesi. The other part is a section where the giant video screens recreate the Burgess sea when the fossil life was alive. Its a brilliant section.
The next left-side alcove is for the Ordovician, Silurian, and Devonian, and highlights the fossil life of Ontario itself, from around my home province, from conodonts to sea scorpions to the now-extinct crinoids. It's a lovely thing that highlights how even if there aren't any mesozoics around, where you live can still find incredible fossils. There's even an interactive where you can find fossils in the province yourself.
Speaking of Devonian, the next part of the exhibit in the main hall take visitors into the period, with a focus on the emerging land fauna and fossil finds in Quebec, as depicted in a nice mural. Naturally, the focus is on early tetrapods and fish, like the lobe-finned Eusthenopteron and Dendrerpeton. You also got further displays on trilobites, orthocones and sea scorpions.
The centrepiece is a giant model of Dunkleosteus, right next to a cabinet of fossil jawed fish, including on found in Ontario's Pelee island.
After that is the Carboniferous. It's admittedly the shortest section of the exhibit, consisting of an alcove for Joggins and one on sea life. At least there is a good section on how the coal of the period contributes to modern day climate change. And the murals are good.
The Permian is directly afterwards. You might expect Dimetrodon to be the focus, and yes its there in its own glass case.
On the wall rounding it out is about aquatic life.
The exhibit ends with a section on the Triassic period, following a red glass wall that separate it from the previous displays, as well as a video display on the Permian Extinction. There's even a small case for the last known trilobite.
Immediately ahead in the Triassic are dinosaurs, specifically the Herrerasaurus and Plateosaurus I talked about last time, as well as hanging Dimorphodons and section for fossil mammals. To the right is a display other archosaurs, like Postosuchus and a phytosaur, aetosaur Landosuchus, and Trilophosaurus, rounded out by petrified wood and a cast of Coelophysis.
The exhibit ends with two on the walls. left are displays for both marine life, such as Ichthyosaurs, and highlights the museums of Triassic ichthyosaurs from BC, as collected by the ROM's scientist Chris McGowen.
On the right, meanwhile, are theropod footprints (including a cast of Dilophosaurus up above), as well as the Triassic Extinction as caused by Pangaea's breakup. Visitors exit out into the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs, with the Jurassic Exhibit visible even from a distance and Gordo standing proud.
In many ways, the Dawn of Life gallery is like Chicago Field Museum of Natural History's excellent Evolving Planet, or at least the first third of it, in that its a single hall going one way with periods of the era arranged in that direction, from the first complex forms of life billions of years ago and stromalites, to the Triassic Period and the token dinosaurs of the exhibit. Considering the original space was already quite narrow, it's as good a use of it can possibly be.
Unlike the other two galleries which are all fossils in grey galleries, The Dawn of Life gallery is way more lively and engaging: you have a blue colour scheme and rounder fonts. You have models of various relevant animals, such as a sea scorpion, orthocone, and Anamolocaris, as well the Dunkleosteus that's more stylised. There are murals in the back that depict fossil formations as they were in their time. You have interactives, like rotating screens depicting shifting continents or casts you can touch. There are both bright lights in addition to natural ones. The terrestrial fossil mounts have pieces of rock that keep them from seeming to just be hovering awkwardly and not actually touch the floor as the other galleries do. You even have special koisks detailing various Paleozoic fossil sites in the country and their significance as explained by scientists at them.
What I love about the gallery is the focus on Canada. This isn't just blind nationalism: Canada has it's fair share of unique fossil finds of the era, and the gallery anchors itself around many of them, like Mistaken Point, Burgess Shale, the Devonian Miguasha National Park and Anticosti Island in Quebec, and Nova Scotia's carboniferous Joggins Cliffs, as mentioned above, working as anchor points for the story of the Paleozoic to wrap around and tell the story of all the anatomical features we take for granted yet have given all animals the power to survive. You even have indigenous land acknowledgments whenever you can, like referring to Ontario by its Huron name, OntarÃ:io. Nice little touch.
While I admit that Paleozoic life isn't my knowledge stronghold, all the information checks out. Just about the only inaccuracy I can nail the exhibit on is depicted Postosuchus as a quadruped and not a biped as is currently believed.
I legit cannot think of any way to improve upon it, beyond the glare from sunlight through windows in the final section, and not having a section in the Triassic on the Wasson Bluff site in NS, and like in the older galleries show which fossils are casts and which are real deal.
If I said so myself it's probably one of the best things the museum has put out in years, and sets a new precedent for it. I'm looking forward to go there again and again, seeing what I missed.
- Presentation - 10/10
- Fossil Variety - 9/10
- Theming - 8/10
- Exhibit Design - 10/10
- Accuracy - 9/10
Well, bar one or two more posts, that should be it for this year, the first at Mesozoic Mind. Goodbye for now, and happy holidays!
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