Author: Phillippa Pitts (Page 13 of 236)

by columnist Kacie Rice

The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

One of my favorite things to do is when I travel is to see new museums, and I and a friend recently had a chance to visit Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), one of North America’s major natural history and anthropology museums. Founded in 1912, the museum serves over one million visitors a year and acts as Canada’s largest field research institution. ROM has a much more encyclopedic collection than we might expect of a typical natural history museum in the United States, more closely following the European model of the “cabinet of curiosity” than the American system of division between subject areas. In addition to dinosaurs, minerals, stuffed animals, and anthropology collections, the museum also houses arts from around the world and artifacts from Canadian history. The ROM’s collections are almost impossible to visit in a single day: in four hours, we weren’t even able to see half of the permanent exhibits – but what we did see was terrific! Continue reading