I apologize. It has been more than a month since RT's last look at the ROM Crystal's construction pictures. And what a month of changes. The Crystal's white skin has folded over most of the remaining voids in the structural steel. It looks very crystalline - not a surprise - also powerful and assertive.

Coincidentally, a friend invited me to attend a ROM "Behind the Scenes" evening this week. People who go to these evenings include some of the museum's financial supporters (clearly, I am not one of them although if I had an extra million or two to spare this is a worthy cause). The approximately one hundred attendees get divided into smaller groups of ten. Those, in turn, are assigned members of the ROM's curatorial team who take the guests to their research area of the museum. I ended up with the earth sciences team. They are the ones who look at rocks and, of course, crystals.



This is one of the ROM's collection of crystals. If it were white . . . could it be the model for the new building? The staff giving the tour were, to say the least, knowledgeable and also charmingly awkward in their role as tour guides. They are the researchers who make this institution of the the world's best so it was a privilege to be able to ask them questions. For example, did you know the ROM has Mars rocks? How do they know they are from Mars? No space craft has ever returned from that planet with a cargo of rocks. That was one of the questions. Know the answer? I didn't.

One our our groups members included an older gentleman who while generally quiet and unobtrusive asked short but concise questions. He had an air about him. Turns out this man just donated $12 million to the ROM for a worthwhile project:

The Schad Family Gallery of Life in Crisis at the ROM will be developed in parallel to a new exhibit at the Earth Rangers Centre in Vaughan, Ontario, focused on solutions to the biodiversity crisis. Together, the ROM Gallery and Earth Rangers exhibit and related joint programs will provide a comprehensive picture of the vast extent of life’s diversity, the processes which drive speciation, and the significant threats and challenges to biodiversity, as well as individual actions and solutions...

Robert Schad is the founder and chairman of Earth Rangers, a partnership-driven environmental charity established in 1999. Its mission is to inspire children with a lasting passion to build a better future by leveraging the affinity that young people have with wildlife and the environment to develop leadership and citizenship skills. Mr. Schad is also the founder and a Director of Husky Injection Molding Systems Ltd.

This image was taken in the Earth Science's research area. People who work at the highest levels of formal science tend to have an informal casualness that this image captures.