Royal Ontario Museum

The Royal Ontario Museum began as a concept at the beginning of the 20th century, when some local Torontonians championed the founding of a new museum, indoctrinated into the Royal Ontario Museum Act in 1912. And at 3pm on March 19, 1914 the museum officially opened its newly-built doors to the public. The museum comprised five separate institutions: the Royal Ontario Museums of Archaeology, Palaeontology, Mineralogy, Zoology, and Geology.

A period of expansion ensued, and the arrival of a new wing in 1933 which was built during the depression using archaic methods and local materials to cut costs. By 1955 the five museums became one large entity, and in 1968 this one museum broke free of the University of Toronto and became its own institution. A $55million renovation was held in 1978, and the museum saw its latest addition, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, completed in 2007.

The museum, Canada's largest for world culture and natural history, houses several innovative and dynamic displays, epitomised in the Bat Cave, where a multitude of media recreates walking through a cave as a flock of bats fly out. Other natural history highlights include the Gallery of Birds, Gallery of Reptiles and the Age of Dinosaurs, which house several immaculately-kept Jurassic to Cretaceous fossils.

Prominent world culture galleries pay homage to ancient Cyprus, China, Egypt, Bronze Age Aegean, Korea, Japan, Canada, Africa and Asia-Pacific. Particular highlights include garments from the Chinese Imperial Court, Chinese Buddhist wooden bodhisattva statues and a Ming era tomb complex.

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