Resourcefulness Of A People

 Scattered throughout the Arctic Gallery are video displays. Press a button for your preferred language, and people begin speaking about a given subject on life in the North. This particular one features Mary Simon, an Inuit leader, speaking about employment and education in the Arctic. Today she is the Governor-General of the country. 

People in the far north have had to be very resourceful in living there. Everything finds a use. This display case includes a fur, as well as a lantern that a century or more ago would have used whale oil for light.

Here we have a work of art. Rookery is by Ben Kovic, combining elements like bowhead whale bone and ivory.

This is the brain case of a bowhead whale.

Millions of years ago, the climate was warmer, and the Arctic was a place of dinosaurs. Fossils of dinosaurs and their successors are still found in the current day.

This is puijila darwini, a forerunner of contemporary seals.

The skeleton here is a contemporary camel. Note the diagram on the display case below, where it is seen in black, compared in size to the High Arctic camel, which was bigger.

Here we have the skull of a mammoth, a resident of the ice age.

Other species died out following the ice age, while others moved into northern waters. The Jefferson's ground sloth ranged far into the north, while the short-faced bear outweighed the contemporary polar bear.

At top is the lower jawbone of a contemporary beaver. Compare it to the lower jawbone of the extinct giant beaver.