Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre

The Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre is one of the more unusual museums in Canada. It focuses on the Ice Age landscape that covered this region 20,000 years ago, when Yukon was part of a vast unglaciated grassland called Beringia, home to mammoths, mastodons, giant short-faced bears, scimitar cats, and the first humans to enter the Americas. The centre has life-size reconstructions and actual fossils, including a full cast of the largest woolly mammoth recovered in North America.

The interpretive exhibits are well-designed and the science is solid — there has been a great deal of Ice Age paleontology done in Yukon because the permafrost preserves organic material exceptionally well. The centre is located near the Whitehorse Airport, about 15 minutes from downtown, which is a slight inconvenience, but it's well worth the trip. Allow an hour and a half at least.

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A story
Beringia was the landmass that connected Asia and North America during the Ice Age, and Yukon was one of the few places in Canada that remained unglaciated — a refugium where animals survived while the rest of the continent was buried under ice. The preserved remains recovered from the Yukon permafrost are extraordinarily intact, including woolly mammoths with hair, flesh, and stomach contents still identifiable.