A letter from our director and CEO.

Nature--The Greatest Story of All

With the opening of the ROM's newest natural history galleries, visitors will encounter two distinct metaphors as aids in understanding nature.

The first metaphor--the "Tree of Life"--deals with evolution. Its roots extend back several billion years, and its branches have grown and changed through the process of natural selection. It describes the proliferation and change of species over time. The Tree of Life will define the entrance of the Peter F. Bronfman Gallery of Early Life, to be built in the last tranche of Renaissance ROM.

The second metaphor--the "Web of Life"--describes an ecosystem, the interconnectedness of species alive at the same time across space. It is explored in the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity, which opens this May on the second floor Centre Block of the Museum.

The Tree of Life is an astounding graphic. In its lower left corner the story starts some three billion years ago with blue-green algae and bacteria, leading to slime molds, green algae, and fungi. These simple ancestors of ours prevailed for, well, eons.

The animal kingdom comes into sight about 800 million years ago, and erupts into marvelous complexity in the oceans 520 million years ago in what is known as the Cambrian Explosion--the "Big Bang of Life." This burst of complexity and variety occurs in a very short moment of geological time--perhaps as short as 15 million years. It is the miraculous basis upon which all fauna subsequently appeared and disappeared through natural selection--many, many species expiring through extinctions small and great, creating conditions for others to grow and develop.

As this "tree" reaches up and out over time, the Earth itself evolves: continents drift, comets hit, volcanoes erupt, and temperatures change. Homo sapiens arrives very recently and we come into our own during the relatively cold last 50,000 years.

At the beginning of the Bronfman Gallery, we will show the entire Tree of Life, leading to the present day through the five great extinctions of which the dinosaurs were just the last. (Are we the next?) And we will offer the world's most authoritative fossil record of the Big Bang of Life from our collection of the Burgess Shale.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of this ancient seabed of fossils, raised thousands of metres into the Rocky Mountains near Golden, British Columbia. (We mark the occasion with a special exhibit.) The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the ROM were the only museums granted permission by Parks Canada to dig the Burgess Shale over this century. The ROM's new Bronfman Gallery will present the results thoroughly and clearly for the first time in the history of this Museum, telling the tale of life's origins, arriving eventually at the dinosaurs. Finally, the story leads into the Schad Gallery of Biodiversity, with the life forms of our own time.

The Schad Gallery's revelations about the Web of Life are described elsewhere in this magazine, and are as gripping as the story of evolution will be in other galleries. The story of nature, tree or web, is the greatest novel of them all.

WILLIAM THORSELL

DIRECTOR AND CEO