Victoria Arbour joined the Royal BC Museum in 2018 as the Curator of Palaeontology following an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto and Royal Ontario Museum, and a postdoctoral appointment at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and North Carolina State University. Victoria is a vertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist and is the leading expert on the palaeobiology of the armoured dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs. She has named several new species of ankylosaurs, studied how they used and evolved their charismatic armour and weaponry, and investigated how their biogeography was shaped by dispersals between Asia and North America.

British Columbia has a rich fossil record spanning over 500 million years of the history of life on Earth. Victoria’s research at the Royal BC Museum will investigate how the ancient plants and animals that lived here responded to changing climates, shifting continents, and mass extinctions. Victoria also hopes to build the currently small but scientifically significant collection of vertebrate fossils (including dinosaurs) from British Columbia through new field expeditions around the province.