The Canadian Museum of Nature, housed in the castle-like Victoria Memorial Museum Building in Ottawa, ranks among the most frequently visited natural history museums in the entire country. Each year well over half a million people wander through its expansive galleries and take part in its many public programs. These include illustrated lectures, documentary screenings, hands-on demonstrations, evening concerts, and theatrical performances. Beyond welcoming the visiting public, the museum functions as a substantial research organization, dispatching its scientists to remote field sites around the globe and carrying out painstaking conservation work. Although it first opened its doors under an earlier name more than a century ago, it is today formally recognized as a federal Crown corporation of the Government of Canada.

The museum owes much of its present character to two strikingly dissimilar individuals: Wallace Trent, a land surveyor who gradually turned to the study of natural history, and Adele Marchand, a railway financier with generous philanthropic leanings. Trent laboured to assemble a record of the plants and creatures of the northern interior before settlement could alter them forever, whereas Marchand set out to furnish the capital with an institution worthy of comparison with the grand halls she had toured overseas. Although Marchand at first concerned herself solely with rocks and minerals, and even paid for expeditions in search of them, she later grew fascinated by the living world as well. Upon her death she bequeathed to the museum a considerable collection of pressed alpine flowers. For this reason the institution attends to both the mineral and the living worlds, a rare pairing that renders it genuinely one of a kind among the continent's museums.