Waymark
Attraction Toronto — Bloor-Yorkville, Canada

Royal Ontario Museum

Canada's largest museum in one well-paced visit: Libeskind's Crystal, the First Peoples gallery and crest poles, Gordo the Barosaurus and the dinosaur halls, the Burgess Shale, Chinese temple murals and ancient Egypt.

Royal Ontario Museum
Photo: Maksim Sokolov (Maxergon) · CC BY-SA 4.0
Duration
1 day
Distance
1.7 km
Difficulty
Easy
Best season
Year-round (best on weekday mornings)
Print day cards

The Royal Ontario Museum is Canada’s largest museum and its most visited, and it is really two museums under one roof: a natural history museum of dinosaurs, fossils, minerals and living things, and a world cultures museum that runs from ancient Egypt to Chinese temple murals to the art of Canada’s First Peoples. Founded in 1912 and opened in 1914, it holds more than 18 million items across some forty galleries, and it is the kind of place where a single wing can fill a morning.

The building tells its own story. The original 1914 wing and its 1933 extension, with a Byzantine-inspired mosaic ceiling in the rotunda, sit behind a sandstone front on Queen’s Park. Crashing out of them onto Bloor Street is the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, Daniel Libeskind’s 2007 addition of tilted aluminium and glass prisms, loved and loathed in roughly equal measure. Inside, the Crystal holds the dinosaur galleries, where Gordo the Barosaurus, the largest dinosaur on display in Canada, stretches his neck over the room.

Most visitors spend three to four hours here. Pick two or three zones and do them properly rather than trying to see everything.

Getting there. Museum station on Line 1 of the subway opens almost directly onto the museum; its platform columns are themselves designed after the collection, echoing Egyptian, Toltec, Greek, Chinese and First Nations forms. St. George station, on Lines 1 and 2, is a short walk west along Bloor Street.

Permits & tickets. Admission is by ticket, best booked online, with timed entry at busy periods; special exhibitions often cost extra. Prices, opening days and any free-admission programmes change, so check the official site before you go.

Good to know:

Tips & Insights for this route Planning this route? Read our practical tips before you go — 8 tips. Read the tips
Download waypoints (GPX) Points of interest in walking order — not a trail trace.

Day by day

DayDistanceAscentDescentWalking time
Day 1 Hardest dayA day at the ROM
Distance1.7 kmAscentNot recordedDescentNot recordedWalking timeNot recorded
Day 1

A day at the ROM

Museum station → Royal Ontario Museum 1.7 km
Navigate this day Print day

From Museum station and the Crystal to the rotunda and First Peoples gallery, the dinosaur halls and natural history galleries, then the Chinese galleries and the ancient world.

Segments

  1. Museum station and the Crystal 0.2 km Map

    Museum station, Line 1 → ROM entrance, Bloor St W at Queen's Park

    Subway platform, sidewalk and indoor lobby

    Start underground: the platform columns at Museum station were redesigned in 2008 to evoke objects in the collection, from Egyptian and Toltec figures to Chinese and First Nations forms. Up on Bloor Street, step back across the road to take in the Crystal, Libeskind's shards of aluminium and glass leaning out over the sidewalk, before you go in. Ticket checks and the coat check follow. Allow 15 minutes.

  2. Rotunda and the Gallery of Canada: First Peoples 0.2 km Map

    Main lobby → Daphne Cockwell Gallery of Canada: First Peoples

    Indoor galleries and stairs

    Walk into the 1933 rotunda to see its gold-tinted mosaic ceiling, then find the two monumental crest poles, one Nisga'a and one Haida, that rise through the stairwells of the old building, the central staircase winding around them. The Daphne Cockwell Gallery of Canada: First Peoples holds one of the most important collections of Indigenous art and belongings in the country, from beadwork and quillwork to contemporary pieces. Allow 45 minutes.

  3. Age of Dinosaurs 0.3 km Map

    Rotunda → Temerty Age of Dinosaurs gallery

    Indoor galleries

    In the Crystal, the dinosaur gallery was renewed with new additions completed in late 2025. Gordo, one of the most complete Barosaurus skeletons known and the largest dinosaur on display in Canada, dominates the room. Look for the Parasaurolophus walkeri holotype, the specimen that defined its species, and the armoured ankylosaur Zuul crurivastator, mounted in a standoff with a Gorgosaurus. The adjoining galleries carry the story on into the age of mammals. Allow an hour.

  4. Natural history galleries
    Natural history galleries 0.4 km Map

    Age of Dinosaurs → Teck Earth's Treasures gallery

    Indoor galleries

    The rest of the natural history floor rewards slow looking. The Willner Madge Gallery, Dawn of Life, traces the earliest life on Earth and draws on the ROM's Burgess Shale collection, the largest in the world, with over 150,000 fossils from the Canadian Rockies. The Bat Cave recreates a Jamaican cave at night, a long-time favourite with children. Life in Crisis tackles biodiversity and extinction, and Teck Earth's Treasures lays out about 3,000 minerals, gems and meteorites. Allow an hour.

    About this place

    The Burgess Shale is a fossil-bearing deposit exposed in the Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, Canada. It is famous for the exceptional preservation of the soft parts of its fossils. At c.505 million years old, it is one of the earliest fossil beds containing soft-part imprints.

    Read more on Wikipedia Photo: Martin R. Smith · CC0
  5. China and East Asia 0.3 km Map

    Natural history galleries → Chinese galleries

    Indoor galleries

    The ROM's Chinese collection is among the most significant outside China. Its centrepieces are the temple wall paintings in the Bishop White Gallery, enormous Buddhist and Daoist scenes from around 1300, and the Ming-era tomb of General Zu Dashou, with its stone gateway and guardian figures. Nearby is the Gallery of Korea, with ceramics, metalwork and Buddhist sculpture. Allow 45 minutes.

  6. The ancient world 0.3 km Map

    Chinese galleries → Egypt and Nubia galleries

    Indoor galleries

    Finish with the ancient Mediterranean and Nile. The Egyptian galleries hold mummies and painted coffins, the Nubian gallery covers the kingdoms to Egypt's south, and the ROM's Roman collection is the largest classical collection in Canada, alongside galleries for ancient Greece and Cyprus. Afterwards, Philosopher's Walk, a leafy path running south from Bloor beside the museum, is a quiet way to walk off the afternoon. Allow 45 minutes.

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