Research Portal

Research forms a key part of the mission of the Royal BC Museum. Staff and associates engage in subject specific projects anchored in the museum’s diverse collections, often in partnership with community cultural authorities, academic specialists, government and NGOs. Focusing on important historical and contemporary questions – our collective research advances knowledge of British Columbia’s biodiversity, evolutionary science and human history.

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Royal British Columbia Museum researchers are involved in many ongoing research projects, often in partnership with colleagues and communities from British Columbia and around the world.

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Remarkable Longevity of Ancient Douglas Fir Wood

Royal BC Museum Botany Collection Reveals Value of BC Old-Growth Rainforests

During a recent inventory of items in the Botany collection of the Royal BC Museum, we unearthed an odd specimen with a rather fascinating history—a 42-centimetre long, 5-centimetre square block of wood with an approximately 100-year-old newspaper clipping and a photograph glued to it.

The newspaper article (from the BC Lumberman, according to a handwritten label) notes that the block of wood came from a Douglas fir “partially embedded in the soil about three miles north of Allco.” Active in the 1920s, Allco was a logging camp near Maple Ridge in the Fraser Valley. (The area is now the Alouette Prison for Women.) The article goes on to point out how extraordinary it is that this log would be so sound given that it was found in an area where conditions would be “very favourable to decay”, and that the “sound material extends clear to the outside of the log”.