RARE is a series of live audience and broadcast events presented in collaboration with Museums Victoria, Royal Botanical Gardens Victoria, Zoos Victoria, the Parliament of Victoria, and the Royal Society of Victoria for National Science Week.
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Earth is that rarest of all things – a blue and green planet teeming with activity in a cosmos that has, thus far, proven devoid of and overwhelmingly hostile to life. But we’re not the only rarity in this vast universe! Join us to explore the world of the RARE – from astronomical and cosmological events, to unusual minerals and elements, to the remarkable plants and animals with whom we share our home.
Featuring scientists from Victoria’s major public scientific and cultural institutions with a strong broadcast focus for our regional audiences, we reveal the innate value of the unique and unusual in nature, and seek your involvement in protecting the RARE.
RARE is presented to Victoria for National Science Week 2022
RARE @ Museums Victoria
From scarce species to supernovae to special specimens you can’t see anywhere else, Museums Victoria is exploring all things rare and precious on Earth…and beyond!
Planetarium Nights
Date: Friday 5, 12, 19 and 26 August
Time: Ticket to the Universe at 7:30-8:30pm and Particle/Wave at 9-10pm
Audience: Adults
Location: Scienceworks
Join Scienceworks’ popular Planetarium Nights programs to explore rare and rarely seen events such as a total solar eclipse, supernovae, and gravitational waves. Astronomers have a strange relationship with the idea of ‘rare’; something we seldom see on Earth may be commonplace at a universal scale. Museums Victoria astronomer Dr Tanya Hill has carefully curated a special selection of rare (or maybe not-so-rare) astronomical events for the show Ticket to the Universe. Or go on a poetic journey into the rarely detected phenomena of gravitational waves with the full-dome feature show Particle/Wave.
Science on Show
Date: Saturday 13 and Sunday 21 August
Time: 11am-2pm
Audience: All ages
Location: Melbourne Museum
Museums Victoria has more than 17 million collection objects, and we’re bringing out some of our rarest and most fascinating samples and specimens at Melbourne Museum for Science on Show. This event will feature curators and scientists delivering pop-up talks on their research, rare artefacts, and the stories behind them, and one of the rarest dinosaur fossils in the world – the most complete Triceratops skeleton ever unearthed, on display for your palaeontological pleasure.
Snap, CT Scan, Model, Predict!
Date: Wednesday 17 August
Time: 6-7:15pm
Audience: best for 12+
Location: Melbourne Museum
Learn what new technology can reveal about rare reptiles and frogs!
For a deep dive into some fascinating science, come to our National Science Week edition of MV Lectures to hear about how cutting-edge technology is helping to detect and study rare species. Hear from the scientists on a bold new research project combining the fields of palaeontology, macro-ecology, computed tomography (CT scanning), taxonomy and genetics. They will illustrate how museum-based work with large, data-rich collections and new non-invasive techniques can reveal more than ever before and built an interactive, online space for collection access.
RARE @ Parliament of Victoria
Champions of conservation and biodiversity will gather at Parliament House for this vital Science Week discussion about the extinction crisis facing thousands of Australia’s native species, and what we can do about it.
Caring for the Rare
Date: Sunday, 21 August 2022
Time: 3 – 4.30pm
Duration: 90min
Location: Online via Facebook Live, cross-posted across pages maintained by the Parliament of Victoria, the Royal Society of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Museums Victoria and Zoos Victoria.
Our State’s remarkable botanical and zoological collections are carefully managed by Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and Zoos Victoria, while Museums Victoria maintains significant collections related to the natural history of our region and the wider world. These familiar institutions do more than offer an interesting place for Victorians to visit – they are also engines of research and field work, helping the State of Victoria to future-proof the unique plants and animals of our region against bushfires, floods, the ongoing impacts from our spreading towns and cities, our intensive farming practices, and our changing climate.
Our public science institutions all care for the rare – through the Seed Bank maintained at the National Herbarium, through activating the amazing network of community botanic gardens across metropolitan and regional Victoria, through the tissue and DNA samples cryogenically stored by Museums Victoria in a BioBank to safeguard the genetic diversity of threatened species, and through the captive breeding programs for species on the brink of extinction, diligently nurtured back to population health by biologists and ecologists at Zoos Victoria.
Join us for this RARE panel conversation, streamed live from Parliament House, to learn from the botanists, zoologists and collection managers leading this important work. Find out some of the ways they are planning to help our plants and animals adapt and persist through the multiple challenges in our immediate future.
Presented in partnership with the Royal Society of Victoria, the Parliament of Victoria, and the Victorian Parliamentarians for STEM for National Science Week 2022.