Fishful Thinking: One Paleontologist Explains How an Important ROM Collection Began with Dinner (Backyard Biodiversity‪)‬

Many people are familiar with the usual museum methods for collecting artifacts or specimens: excavate for dinosaur bones or ancient ruins, run expeditions to exotic or inhospitable places to find elusive or undescribed species. This is the stuff of National Geographic TV programs, even the pages of our own ROM magazine. But for more than 20 years now, I have been collecting museum specimens in a more commonplace locale--Toronto supermarkets. In North America, our diet is quite restricted. We tend to eat only a few kinds of birds--chicken, turkey, quail--and mammals--cow, pig, lamb--and no amphibians or reptiles (how many of you have had frog legs or alligator more than once?). Even the fish in our supermarkets are not diverse: think salmon, cod, sole, maybe snapper and a few others, and most often they come as boneless fillets. But this is not the case in other cultures.