Knowledge open to the public: permanent exhibition of Zoology maintains attention during January

With its lawns and gardens, the UdeC is one of the most visited places in the city, where people find spaces for recreation and contact with nature and also for learning.

Under the protection of its faculties, the house of studies keeps an extensive scientific heritage, in different collections, which is used for research and teaching, and which it shares with the community through exhibitions open to the public.

In the hall of the third floor of the Faculty of Natural and Oceanographic Sciences (FCNO) is the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Zoology of the UdeC, one of the pillars of the outreach actions and links with the environment that the academic unit carries out throughout the year.

The exhibition -preferably aimed at students in the educational system- continues to be open as one more panorama for those who visit the neighborhood during the summer.

The museum, whose origins go back to the founding period of the university, is one of the most important in its area within the country; It has more than 700,000 specimens, representative of almost 15,000 native and exotic species, distributed in 36 different collections.

This extensive treasure is represented in the permanent exhibition through a selection of samples of Chilean birds, their nests and eggs; fish, crustaceans, rodents, amphibians and reptiles.

“The exhibition hall to the public, Professor Hugo Moyano, houses a small but significant part of the collections. In them, samples of mollusks, echinoderms, fish, mammals, among other representatives of the Chilean fauna have been selected, through an exhibition organized around general themes”, says the director of the Museum, the academic Enrique Rodríguez-Serrano.

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The doctor in Biological Sciences with a mention in Ecology says that the exhibition puts a special emphasis on the fauna of the Biobío Regionalso including samples of hidden biodiversity, which are unicellular organisms -such as bacteria or protozoa- that are difficult to see and can be observed through their biological activities.

There is also a small display of zoological curiosities, among which the academic highlights edible grasshoppers and jumping beans, a type of bean that has a larva inside.

“We don’t have them alive, because they are quarantine pests -he clarifies-, but we even have some cans on display.”

The director of the Museum mentions in particular two emblematic specimens of the exhibition: the puma and the rhea who -he says- “are the protagonists of the selfies”.

The exhibition is open from Monday to Friday, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. and visitors are received on a first-come, first-served basis.

MUDEC

The Zoology collection along with those of Botany, Anthropology, Geology and Anatomy are part of the University of Concepción Museum (MUDEC), a long-standing project that seeks to concentrate in a single space the extensive university scientific heritage that as a whole reaches more than two million copies.

The dean of the FCNO, Margarita Marchant San Martinis the coordinator of this initiative that contemplates the construction of a building of 4 thousand 875 square meters intended for exhibitions, storage of collections and laboratories, as well as a center for links with the environment.

“In an unprecedented way in Chile, the University of Concepción has the opportunity to design and build a museum from its origin. MUDEC will conserve the biodiversity of our natural and human heritage for new generations and scientific studies. In this way, it will become a UdeC icon for the city and the country”, says Dr. Marchant.

The academic highlights that, in this way, “the contribution of scientific collections to the generation of knowledge is recognized, through research, conservation and dissemination of said collections, as a heritage value at a regional, national and Latin American level”.

MUDEC’s museographic proposal has already been completed and the architectural project is currently being worked on.