UCMP's Cal Day 2006 open house(page 1 of 2) |
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[NOTE: More UCMP Cal Day photos, as well as enlargements of the photos in this article, can be viewed here.] Who survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction and who didn't? That was the big question
addressed by UCMP at its annual open house held in conjunction with
Cal Day, Saturday, April
22. In UCMP's "fishbowl," visitors got to see representative fossils from a wide variety of
organisms that were affected by the event that took out about 60% of living species 65 million
years ago. From forams to ferns, cephalopods to ceratopsians, few groups of life forms escaped
the effects of the extinction event some disappeared, some squeaked by, but with
drastically reduced diversity, and some even prospered. The displays representing these changes
saw a steady stream of visitors all day long.
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from its plaster jacket.
Upstairs, the always popular "Fun With Fossils" activity drew plenty of would-be paleontologists,
eager to find cool microfossils in matrix samples collected in Montana. And down in the Wallace
Atrium, practically in the shadow of the big T. rex skeleton, UCMP outreach staffers sold
museum tee shirts and distributed free tickets for the once-a-year tours of the museum's research
collections, normally off-limits to the public. |