[text: Opposites]
[narrator] The Canadian Museum of Nature's collection contains over 14.6 million specimens.
Some of these include the hardest minerals on Earth. Or the extremely delicate skeleton of glass sponges.
Hard or soft, these amazing treasures can tell us about the environment in which they evolved.
Let's have a look behind the collection doors and discover some of them.
[Stéphanie Tessier, Collections Manager, Vertebrates] Here in the wet vertebrate lab, we prepare whole specimens.
This Coelacanth pup is preserved in ethanol. We have all the soft tissue, organs and skeleton preserved.
So the process for this, we first fix the specimen using formalin, which is a formaldehyde and water solution and that tightens the structures.
And after that, we do a series of transfers in ethanol, where it will be preserved for long term.
Sometimes we need to work with hard material such as skeletons, bones, or cartilage.
We have many specimens. Some of them are articulated. So you can see how the bones connect to each other.
We also have skulls where we can look at morphology. We also have this articulated skeleton that we use as comparative material.
Researchers would use them to compare fossils, or people working in archaeology
would bring small fragments or small bones, and we try to figure out what it is using this reference material.
[Jordan Mallon, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Palaeobiology] When we think about fossils and we think about dinosaurs, we often think about their preserved hard parts.
Something like the skull of Lambeosaurus here, maybe its teeth.
These things preserve very well in the fossil record and so they're relatively easy to find.
But if we're really lucky, we can also find examples of soft tissues. I have here the skin impression of one of these duck-billed dinosaurs.
This is an example of soft tissue, although it's not the actual soft skin itself. This is an impression that was left in the rock.
The important thing about these soft tissues is that they give us a glimpse into the lives of dinosaurs that we wouldn't know otherwise.
[Alan McDonald, Collection Technician, Palaeobiology] So here in Palaeobiology, when we collect fossils from the field, we jacket them up
in plaster of Paris, in burlap cases, so that we can protect them until they get back here to the lab.
Once they're back here in the lab, we'll open up those jackets and continue to remove the surrounding rock from around the fossils.
This rock can be either hard or soft.
When the fossil comes in a very soft matrix or surrounding rock, we'll tend to use hand tools such as dental picks—
just like you use in a dentist's office—to remove the soft rock gently, without harming the fossil.
Sometimes the fossils come surrounded by very, very hard rock, which requires a lot more effort to remove.
In which case, we'll use these air-driven chisels to remove the rock.
This is a Swam Blaster. It's an air abrasive unit that uses sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, as an abrasive.
It shoots it out through a little air jet, and what it does is remove the very soft rock
from around a very delicate specimen, or to provide a finishing removal—all the little tiny bits that we can't get, down to the cracks and crevices.
[text: Tetsuto Miyashita, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Palaeobiology] Do you remember how happy you were as a kid when you got the balloon artist
who made the dog out of the stretched-out balloon?
Well, hagfish, which I have here, is the one fish that can actually do that, because they don't have any hard part to their body.
They don't have teeth, or bones or any hard parts. They can be very flexible.
They use the soft body to actually feed. So they attach to the food and then they tie themselves in a knot
and they yank the flesh off by just untying themselves and pulling themselves away from the food.
These are fossil fish that are long extinct and they are called ostracoderms—"bony skin" in Latin—
because they have this bony armour that covers their body.
They look very distinct from the hagfish.
The recent research that we've done at this museum is uncovering the evidence that these soft-bodied hagfish
actually came from a fish that had a bony armour like this.
It's one of those surprising stories where a fish could evolve to assume a very primitive appearance,
but the appearance is deceptive because their ancestors actually had these thick bony armours.
[narrator] Hard or soft, the museum's research and collections staff takes great care in preserving these specimens
for the global scientific community and will continue to do so for years to come.
[text: To learn more about the National Natural History Collection, visit nature.ca]