Videos
Featured videos from the Burke Museum. Find more on our YouTube channel.
How do we really know what happened before we were here? At the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, we bring together people, objects, and the stories that make them meaningful. To learn more, visit: http://lifebeforeyou.org.
Video: Discover The Life Before You
How do we really know what happened before we were here? At the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, we bring together people, objects, and the stories that make them meaningful. To learn more, visit: http://lifebeforeyou.org.
Explore the Burke Museum Fishes Collection
Fishes collection manager, Katherine Maslenikov, takes SpaceSaver on a tour of the Fishes collection at the University of Washington.
Studying tropical bats with Sharlene Santana
Sharlene Santana is an evolutionary biologist and the new curator of mammals here at the Burke Museum. She studies how behavior, diet, anatomy and function result in bursts of diversification in tropical bats -- mostly from Panama, Costa Rica and Venezuela. Read a Q & A with Sharlene on our blog: burkemuseum.blogspot.com Some of the tropical forests where Sharlene has worked no longer exist because they have been cut down. While Sharlene releases most of the bats she studies in the field, she collects some specimens to help preserve the biodiversity of these increasingly threatened habitats. In her research today and other studies in the future, these specimens in collections will help answer questions that haven't even been asked. For more information, visit Sharlene's website: faculty.washington.edu or burkemuseum.org.
Last Stands: Conservation Stories From Behind the Lens
Photographer TJ Watt regularly explores the remaining old-growth rainforests on Vancouver Island, B.C. These are some of the world's most spectacular old-growth temperate (non-tropical) rainforests, where trees have trunks as wide as living rooms and grow as tall as skyscrapers. Sadly, 75% of the island's productive old-growth forests have already been logged, including 90% of the valley bottoms. While hiking in March 2010, he took a photograph now known as "Last Stands."
Unearthing the Giant Turtle Fossil
Last summer the Burke's fossil preparator, Bruce Crowley and a team of volunteers excavated a giant turtle - but finding it was only the beginning. We set up a camera to capture time-lapse video as our staff and volunteers prep the giant turtle in our fossil lab to show just what it takes to uncover the turtle. Click here to read more about the discovery: burkemuseum.blogspot.com