This past July, David Smith, retired Visual Communications Specialist with UCMP’s Education & Public Outreach unit, retraced the route of Annie Alexander’s 1901 Fossil Lake Expedition to south-central Oregon. His guide was a scrapbook in the UCMP Archives containing some 120 photographs with short, day-by-day descriptions of the expedition’s activities. He was accompanied by his wife, Colleen Whitney, UCMP’s first staff webmaster (2000-2004), and friend, Kirk Hastings, a retiree from the … [Read more...] about Retracing the Fossil Lake Expedition
Exploring Annie Alexander’s Saurian Expedition of 1905
In 1905 UCMP benefactress Annie Alexander financed and took part in an expedition to the West Humboldt Mountains of Nevada to collect vertebrate fossils in the Triassic limestones. The crew came home with portions of some 25 ichthyosaur skeletons. Alexander put together a scrapbook containing her chronicle of the trip and many photographs; the scrapbook was given to UCMP following Alexander’s death in 1950 and is one of the most treasured items in the museum’s archives. Up until now, the … [Read more...] about Exploring Annie Alexander’s Saurian Expedition of 1905
Bones in the Belltower, a Berkeley Science Review feature by Sara ElShafie
The Fall 2015 issue of the Berkeley Science Review features an article by Sara ElShafie, a UCMP graduate student in the Padian Lab, on the McKittrick tar seep fossils that have been stored in the Campanile since the 1930s. The convergence of an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to the UCMP to clean and catalogue more the 12,000 specimens in the collection and the centennial celebration of the Campanile in 2015 shined a spotlight on these unique fossils. In interviews with UCMP … [Read more...] about Bones in the Belltower, a Berkeley Science Review feature by Sara ElShafie
The 2015 UCMP Fossil Treasures Calendar now available
UCMP and the development of the ichthyosaur quarry at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park The focus for the 2015 calendar became Nevada’s Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park when a trove of 35 mm slides and black & white prints chronicling the development of the ichthyosaur quarry was found in the museum archives. These images, from the Charles L. Camp Papers, dominate the calendar, however, there are also slides from the collections of Sam Welles and Joe Gregory, images from the Huff family archives, … [Read more...] about The 2015 UCMP Fossil Treasures Calendar now available
Paleontological field work and nuclear testing
In the mid to late 1950s, Charles L. Camp, Professor in the Department of Paleontology and former Director of UCMP (1930-1949), spent his summers working at what would later become Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, about 55 miles north of Tonopah, Nevada, and 150 miles northwest of Yucca Flat at the Nevada Test Site. Beginning in 1951 and ending in 1992, the United States did extensive nuclear testing at Yucca Flat. There were 739 tests conducted there, resulting in Yucca Flat being called “the … [Read more...] about Paleontological field work and nuclear testing