ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM: THIS MUSEUM WILL BE TELEVISED

Our most recent visit to the Royal Ontario Museum, the ROM, was inspired by TV. No, not the history of TV, which pretty much consists of talking puppets, men in drag and horny spaceship captains, but by a TV program about history. Or, more accurately, a TV show about museums, which have just a little bit to do with history. And (you have to love this irony) the show airs on the History Channel. It's called Museum Secrets.
The show visits museums all around the world, relating stories not heard in a long time, and examining exhibits that have not been seen by the public in a long time, if ever. The series visited the ROM and to celebrate, the museum this month put on display a few of the exhibits discussed in the show.
The exhibit was small, but certainly diverse. They showed everything from a headdress owned (if not actually ever worn) by Sitting Bull ...

.. to a bull dog who's genes can be found in the majority of English Bulldogs in Canada today ..
.. to a rather a gigantic medieval cross bow, accompanied by some mysterious vessels that seem to have thermal properties ..
... some speculate that these vessels may have been an early form of hand grenades ..
.. and some fossil remains, never before displayed, of a "lost" ROM dinosaur ...
Perhaps the most compelling object in the exhibit was that of a baby mummy

Not a lot is known about the infant. It was a male, approximately 6 months old, perhaps from a wealthy family
The museum has never opened the elaborate wrapping for fear of damaging it, or the mummy inside, so they have only had X-rays with which to glean any information about the mummy.
After going through the Museum Secrets exhibit, we decided to spend some time in the ROM's Native Canadian Exhibit, a space that we haven't explored in some time.
Although the exhibit touches on the life of early Natives from all over Canada, much it focussed on the peoples who lived in this part of the world, around the Great Lakes.

One of the objects that really captured my attention and my imagination was a war robe, an elk hide robe that through pictures, told the personal history of it's owners life through the battles in which he had been involved.

You'll see the robe, along with other highlights from our visit, in the video below.

Royal Ontario Museum: Museum Secrets from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.