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Comme il fallait s’y attendre, il prit la direction du muséum, dont il supervisa le transfert de Montréal à Ottawa quand la commission installa son siège dans cette ville en 1881. À titre de paléontologue, puis aussi de zoologiste attaché à la commission, il identifia et décrivit des fossiles et des formes récentes d’invertébrés provenant de toutes les régions du Canada.
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In 1875 Whiteaves joined the Geological Survey of Canada; the following year he succeeded Elkanah Billings* as palaeontologist. The tasks which he undertook for the survey were numerous and varied. He quite naturally assumed direction of its museum in turn, and he ended up supervising the museum’s transfer from Montreal to Ottawa when the survey moved its headquarters there in 1881. As staff palaeontologist, and later also as zoologist, he identified and described invertebrates, in both recent and fossil forms, collected from across Canada. He also studied fishes of the Devonian stratum as well as stromatoporoids, cephalopods, and land and fresh water Mollusca. Descriptions of his work figure in the annual reports and serial publications he prepared for the survey; the most famous treat the Mesozoic and Palaeozoic fossils of Canada. He also served as one of the survey’s four assistant directors – a bureaucratic arrangement that one assistant director, George Mercer Dawson, called “idiotically unworkable.” Perhaps because he tried to play too many different roles on the survey, other naturalists would complain that his work was slipshod.
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