SA Museum: Our Biodiversity Gallery - (Part 4) Coastal Region with Keith Conlon in the Adelaide City region of South Australia

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity and it's no accident that the South Australia Museum's new Biodiversity Gallery opened its doors on the anniversary of Sir Charles Darwin's birth. The $4.5 million exhibition takes you through the four distinct biodiversity zones in South Australia from the dry arid region, the temperate, coastal and marine zone - underwater into the oceans of the south.

The museum's 3D design team has recreated around 2,500 species and made over 12,000 individual models - electing to make intricate replicas rather than capture, kill and stuff or dry them. The result is spectacular… like a recreation of the life clinging to a pylon holding up the Edithburgh Jetty on the Yorke Peninsula. It's extremely lifelike and in some cases they do really come to life on the big screen.

Jo Bain: "We filmed this underwater vision on the West Coast near Coffin Bay at a place called the Frenchman. When I came up (with the footage) our video guy looked at it and said 'what have you done with the camera?' The colours just didn't look real - everything was blue and green and purple. It was just extraordinary. I have dived all over Australia and all over the world and I've never seen a more colourful reef. "

Jo was so impressed with what he saw underwater he had it recreated for the gallery. "One of then things that's really important is to teach people about sponge reefs because they are an important ecosystem so we did our best to recreate it using modern materials and a lot of moulding and casting."

An army of specialist artists, sculptors and painters used fibreglass, resins and polyurethanes to create these amazing lifelike sponges and other creatures that live beneath coast.

Jo: "There's a thousand of them there. I can tell you exactly how many of everything is in this case. There's a thousand of those, this fine little corals - there's 6,500 in this case."

It's an extraordinary team effort and that sums up the entire gallery - $4.5 Million and five years in the making it's an accessible and exhilarating trip through our truly unique biodiverisity. It's so good, you'll need to come back again and again. We're sure Sir Charles Darwin would have approved.

The new Biodiversity Gallery at the South Australian Museum is open daily from 10am - 5pm and entry is free.

Professor Chris Daniel's DVD on Urban Biodiversity is on sale in the gift shop.

Special thanks to SA Museum Prof Chris Daniels UniSA Paul Ryan

South Australian Museum
North Tce
Adelaide

Published 21st February 2010