Royal Ontario Museum

The Royal Ontario Museum is Canada's attic, laboratory and cabinet of wonders in one building — 13 million objects spanning art, culture and nature, which makes it the largest museum in the country and one of the most omnivorous anywhere: dinosaurs on one floor, Ming tomb figures on another, a bat cave, a suit of samurai armour, meteorites older than the planet's crust. The building announces the split personality at the door: Daniel Libeskind's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal — a prismatic aluminium-and-glass eruption bursting out of the original 1914 heritage façade on Bloor Street — remains Toronto's most argued-about architecture two decades on, and walking from crystal into the old galleries and back is part of the show.

The collection's greatest hits earn their reputations. The dinosaur galleries are the ROM's heart — Gordo the Barosaurus, a 27-metre neck ambushing you at the gallery entrance; a superb T. rex; and the museum's scientific speciality, the Burgess Shale fossils, half-billion-year-old soft-bodied creatures from a British Columbia quarry that rewrote evolution's opening chapters. The First Peoples gallery handles Indigenous art and history with genuine curatorial partnership; the Chinese collection (the temple wall paintings, the Ming tomb) is among the best outside Asia; and the Earth's Treasures vault of gems and gold does its glittering business for the mineral-minded. Kids get the hands-on CIBC Discovery Gallery and the bat cave, a genuinely dark walk-through that has been scaring six-year-olds joyfully since 1988.

Craft of the visit: it's big but not Louvre-cruel — two to three focused hours covers the hits, and the free galleries map at the desk beats wandering. Weekday mornings belong to school groups in the dinosaur halls (aim for after 1 PM if you want Gordo to yourself); the special exhibitions are usually worth the supplement; and the museum sits directly on the Museum subway stop, with Yorkville's cafés one block north for the debrief. Online entry skips the ticket-desk queue, and the ROM pairs naturally with a Bloor-Yorkville afternoon or the University of Toronto campus walk next door.