Royal BC Museum

After many years of wanting to go to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Dick, Wilma, and I finally designated a day to visit.  It was as great as expected.  I did not know that the museum has an actual baby mammoth, Lubya,  She was excavated from permafrost in Russia several years ago, featured in National Geographic.  One month old when she died, Lubya is the most complete mammoth ever found.  And she's here in BC!

There are fine dioramas of Ice Age critters at the Royal BC.  A Columbian mammoth holds court with a short faced bear and a saber toothed cat.

The cat is especially fierce.  There is a great IMAX movie showing at the museum that brings the mammoths, cats, and dire wolves to life...really!  You wear 3 D glasses and the critters seem to jump into your grill, trumpeting, roaring, and snarling.  Kinda glad I live now and not then!  

Here's a short faced bear, standing 12 feet high.  The early cave men had to make sure one of these guys was not in residence before they took over a cavern.

And here's your congenial host at the Royal BC Museum, The Mammoth!  He's life size...larger than all living elephants...and has been the symbol of the museum for at least twenty years.  He used to be situated near the entrance, where you could see him without going inside.  Now he's well within the premises, but well worth paying the admission to see.

Another shot of Mister Mammoth.  Museum setting on the Nikon Coolpix produces this image.

There is a special exhibit on the Ice Age running at the museum now, but there's much more to see.  This diorama features some of BC's local sloats, including a massive Steller's sea lion on the right.  

One of the museum's real treasures is its collection of coastal Indian art.  Here are three totems carved in the late 19th/early 20th century.  It turns out that there were many more totem poles carved by the Haida, Kwakiutl, and other coastal tribes after European contact...when they gained access to metal tools...than before.

A fine design, found in a Haida lodge, I believe.

This bench was originally in a Kwakiutl chief's home; he donated it and many other artifacts to the museum in the early or mid 20th century.

A line of totems in the museum.

A collection of masks, behind glass.