The museum's most prominent display is a 25-metre (82-foot) skeleton of a female blue whale buried in Tignish, Prince Edward Island, which is suspended over the ramp leading to the main collections.

It formed the final side of a landscaped quadrangle created by the 2006 construction of the Aquatic Ecosystems Research Laboratory.

The museum lies parallel to one of the main walking routes of the university campus, was described in Exploring Vancouver: the architectural guide as "a perfect commission for architects known for creative restraint".

The centre does not have air conditioning, except in some of its laboratories; instead, the temperature level is mediated by natural ventilation through the facility's concrete walls and by the use of sunshades on the outside of the building.

[10] The idea for a single museum to house all of these collections was first put forward in 2001 by university faculty in the Departments of Zoology and Botany, who suggested "a building that would facilitate interdisciplinary work on biodiversity, house UBC's biodiversity researchers and collections, and contain a public natural history museum".

The museum is named after Ross and Trisha Beaty, UBC alumni who donated Can$8 million in funding to support its creation.

[5][13] The Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa began exhibiting its juvenile blue whale skeleton at around the same time.

[14] The process of recovering, transporting and displaying the whale was featured in a Discovery Channel documentary called Raising Big Blue, first aired in Canada on June 5, 2011.

[15] The museum holds extensive, representative samples of nearly all species – and most subspecies – of British Columbia's terrestrial vertebrates and marine mammals.

Over 39,000 items from the Cowan Tetrapod Collection have been indexed in Vertnet, a "collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation that aims to make biodiversity data free and openly accessible on the web from publishers worldwide".

The collection was primarily used for teaching purposes and eventually grew to several thousand specimens encompassing the major lineages of invertebrate animals.

[18] Items in the collection represent the "major lineages of animals" and include cnidarians, molluscs, annelids, echinoderms, crustaceans, and sponges.

His collection of mostly vascular plants was housed in downtown Vancouver at the Botanical Offices on West Pender Street.

An algal collection also appeared prior to 1952, based on a donation by Mirian Armstead; although it was initially quite small, under the curatorship of Robert Scagel it expanded rapidly to a 67,000-item scope.

The herbarium collection includes the land plants—conifers, ferns, mosses, flowering plants, and their relatives as well as algae, lichens and fungi.

The vascular plants collection is two-thirds Canadian (45% from British Columbia and 22% from other provinces and territories), 16% American (9% from Hawaii and the Pacific coast and 7% from the other states), and 17% from other countries.

The collection has "particularly strong holdings of Hemiptera (true bugs), Odonata (dragonflies and damselflies), Siphonaptera (fleas) and Anoplura and Mallophaga (lice)."

Locations covered include Canada, the Aleutians, the Malay Archipelago, Mexico, the Galapagos Islands, Panama, and the Amazon River Basin.

Highlights of the collection include its stromatolites (rock formations consisting of blue-green algae dating back 500 million years – some of the oldest extant fossils) and examples of the Burgess Shale.

[24] In 2018, the museum added 3 casts of dinosaur trackways from Peace Region area of British Columbia to its permanent exhibitions.

[25] The museum's blue whale exhibit was included in Scout Magazine's list of "1,000 Cool Things about Vancouver".