UCMP’s summer adventures 2005

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Every summer, many of the UCMP faculty, staff, and students leave Berkeley behind and scatter around the world for meetings, research, and sometimes, just for fun.

Tony Barnosky spent part of the summer writing grant proposals, and part, traveling to caves in northern California, Colorado, and Wyoming to scope out new projects and clean up old ones. The explorations yielded new Holocene and Pleistocene bone sites, some of which will form a focus for research on biodiversity dynamics in California.

Mark Goodwin was pretty busy digging up a mammoth this summer (see mammoth article); however, he did travel to Montana to work on several projects, including a manuscript on the smallest Triceratops skull known—co-authors Jack Horner, Bill Clemens, and Kevin Padian. The paper is expected to be published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology this fall. While in Bozeman, Mark and Jack also began to study a unique cranial growth series of Triceratops skulls.

Carole Hickman continued her research on the island of Moorea (French Polynesia) with a small relict population of Partula taeniata. This famous tree snail was declared extinct more than 20 years ago, along with the other eight partulid species endemic to the island. However, Carole discovered this previously unknown population in 2003 and now,

  Jenny McGuire recovers rodent bones from a cave
Grad student Jenny McGuire recovers fossil rodent bones from a cave in northern California while on a prospecting expedition with Tony Barnosky, Research Associate Liz Hadly, UCMP graduate Bob Feranec, and Stanford graduate student Jessica Blois. (photo by Tony Barnosky)

Small Triceratops skulls
In the foreground is UCMP 154452, the smallest Triceratops skull known (30 cm long). Behind it is MOR 1199, a slightly older juvenile Triceratops (80 cm long). (photo by Mark Goodwin)

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