Each year we offer several temporary exhibitions presenting a variety of topics. Visit the upcoming exhibitions schedule to learn more about what is booked to be on display, or view our list of past exhibitions to see what we have previously hosted. We are currently offering the “Ice Age Mammals” exhibition.
Ice age mammals
The “Ice Age Mammals” exhibition will be on display at the Peterborough Museum and Archives March 9, 2019 to September 8, 2019.
Did you know there once were lions and tigers in North America? They lived during a remarkable time in Earth's history – the last ice age – which is the subject of this 4,000 square foot national travelling exhibition, on loan from the Canadian Museum of Nature.
"Ice Age Mammals" shows the dramatic effects of environmental change over time, from four million to roughly ten thousand years ago. Four million years ago, the High Arctic was much warmer than today, with a boreal forest ecosystem similar to modern-day Labrador. Bears, three-toed horses, tiny primitive deer (deerlets) and small beavers called dipoides inhabited it.
Visitors then cross more than two million years into another section of the exhibition – the ice age – when glaciers covered most of North America; mammoths, mastodons and other great beasts roamed grassy plains in the Yukon and other areas.
Canadian Museum of Nature paleontologists Dr. Richard (Dick) Harington and Dr. Natalia Rybczynski were the scientific advisors to this exhibition. Harington has collected and identified some forty thousand fossils during his thirty-three year career with the Canadian Museum of Nature. Rybczynski has worked with him in the Arctic when she was undertaking her Master's and Doctorate degrees. Their fieldwork stories, told through video in this exhibition, bring alive the challenges of Arctic fieldwork as well as the excitement of uncovering long-extinct species.
"Ice Age Mammals" boasts many real specimens (some on public display for the first time), such as a life-size cast of a mastodon skeleton. Recreated on fabric panels are beautiful large murals of ice age artwork by Yukon paleoartist, George "Rinaldino" Teichmann.
Funding for his exhibits is from the Department of Canadian Heritage's Museum Assistance Program and by the Community Foundation of Greater Peterborough.
The development of this exhibition is a partnership with the Centre des Science de Montréal, Yukon Beringia, and the Royal Tyrell Museum.
