University of California Museum of Paleontology

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News & Updates

Posted by UCMP

Narimane Chatar, current NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Jack Tseng's lab, was awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship to begin December of this year. The MSCA Postdoc is a competitive award from the European Union and funds up to 3 years of research work. Narimane will spend two years of her fellowship working with Jack at UC Berkeley, followed by a third year in collaborator Borja Figueirido's lab at the University of Malaga in Spain. Her project is titled … [Read more...] about Narimane Chatar awarded MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship

Posted by UCMP

Come join us at UCMP! Apply now for our senior museum scientist position to oversee UCMP's paleobotany collections and museum labs. UCMP houses the pre-eminent paleobotany collection on the West Coast. The collection is global in scope, but its greatest strengths are in the Cenozoic (with plenty of Paleogene) floras of California, Oregon, and Washington. The collections continue to grow through fieldwork by University of California faculty, staff, and students as well as donations from private … [Read more...] about Apply for Senior Museum Scientist position at UCMP

Posted by UCMP

The University has made Cal Day a day for admitted students and their families. UCMP will be tabling on Cal Day, Saturday, April 19, 2025 from 10am-4pm in the STEM Bonanza Tent along with other members of the Berkeley Natural History Museums on the North Lawn of the Valley of Life Sciences building. We’ll be displaying fossils and have information on student opportunities. Students can “Meet the T. rex” from 11:00 am - 2:00 pm in the atrium of VLSB, 1st floor, in front of the life-size … [Read more...] about UCMP welcomes admitted students on Cal Day 2025

Posted by UCMP

Diane has been an invaluable member of the UC Museum of Paleontology community for the past thirty years, managing a world-class paleobotanical fossil collection and ensuring its longevity and accessibility for generations to come. And while Diane has many years of service at UC, in the past 3 years she has only ramped up her work. She has taken on leadership roles in three separate and unrelated collections grants and is managing multiple large digitization grants, coupled with mentoring dozens … [Read more...] about Diane Erwin receives 2025 Chancellor’s Outstanding Staff Award

Posted by UCMP

The UCMP has long been dedicated to providing a diversity of innovative and engaging resources for STEM education, bridging the gap between ground-breaking scientific research and both formal and informal science education. Outreach Programming UCMP has a rich history of offering high quality educational web resources since the early days of the web. In 1995 we launched the UCMP home page, one of the first online resources in paleontology! In 2004 we launched the Understanding Evolution … [Read more...] about Support science and the UCMP during #Cal Big Give!

Posted by Derrick Leong

How do we perceive the world around us? In order to understand what surrounds us, we utilize all our senses to make informed decisions. Similarly, this can be applied to the fossil record, as studying the sensory biology of extinct animals can provide insight into the environment they were living in. My research is centered around exploring the diversity of the cephalic lateral line system across phylogeny and different environments. The cephalic lateral line system allows fish and aquatic … [Read more...] about How Fish Sense The World: Insight Into The Lateral Line System

Posted by UCMP

The Making of Habitable Planets and the Origin of Life Save the Date!  Saturday, March 1, 2025, 9am - 4pm The UC Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) Short Course is back after a long hiatus! From the Big Bang to the formation of the stars, planets and elements, questions about the formation of our solar system, the shaping of planet Earth, and the origin of life remain. Please join us to hear leading UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists speak on the origin of … [Read more...] about The UCMP Annual Short Course is back!

Posted by UCMP

UCMP will be tabling at the STEM Bonanza Tent located on the North side of the Valley of Life Sciences Building to welcome prospective students and their families on Cal Day, Saturday, April 13, 2024 from 9am-4pm. We'll be displaying fossils and have information on student opportunities. For those interested in learning more about Tyrannosaurus rex, please head inside VLSB to “Meet the T. rex” from 11:00 am -1:00 pm in the atrium of VLSB, 1st floor, in front of the life-size … [Read more...] about Meet the T. rex and STEM Bonanza for Cal Day 2024

Posted by UCMP

Support our students during #CalBigGive!   Undergraduates from across Berkeley campus find their way to the UCMP via classes taught by our faculty and graduate students and through the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP), finding the varied research programs among members of the community to align with their field of study as well as their personal interests.  Many of our student assistants have a deep interest in paleontology and geology, and working in … [Read more...] about Support our students during Big Give!

Posted by UCMP

  The New Year ushers in a trio of publications from members of the UCMP community: Graduate student Jaemin Lee and collaborator Nick Famoso published on the oldest (29-million-year-old!) fossil grasshopper nest. Find the paper published on eScholarship. Professor Cindy Looy, collaborator Steffan Kiel and UCMP alum Rosemary Romero published a study on the age of fossil kelp holdfasts and the marine communities built upon them. Read more about it from this UC … [Read more...] about Grasshoppers, kelp, and frogs featured in recent publications from UCMP

Posted by Maya Samuels-Fair

Collecting Bryozoa from Stevns Klint, Denmark 70 million years ago, Denmark was a warm sea. Rich and varied communities of invertebrates inhabited the seafloor. These ecosystems left behind vast chalk deposits, which have been mined for building material, writing utensils, and fertilizer for over a thousand years. The chalk is also special to paleontologists, because it is rich in fossils and spans the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, one of the largest mass extinctions in Earth’s … [Read more...] about How do mass extinctions reshape ecosystems?

Posted by Helina Chin, with Derrick Leong, James Pinto, and Leah Kahn

The 2023 Field Methods in Paleobiology course revisited the Basin & Range Province in Nevada and Utah, lead by Professors Seth Finnegan and Jack Tseng. Seth and Professor Cindy Looy spearheaded this trip back in 2017, which was documented by my predecessor Dave Smith. Find them here: part 1 and part 2.  The group would investigate Paleozoic-early Mesozoic shale and limestone topped by Miocene-Pleistocene deposits of sedimentary rock and perhaps learn about how that unconformity … [Read more...] about A Photo essay – Great Basin, a time in the Ordivician and Cambrian

Posted by UCMP

From the 20-foot-long jawbones of the filter-feeding blue whale to the short, but bone-crushing, jaws of the hyena and the delicate chin bones of a human, the pair of lower jawbones characteristic of mammals have evolved with amazing variation. But at first glance, having a single bone on each side of the head — which creates a stiff lower jaw, or mandible — doesn’t appear to give mammals an advantage over other vertebrates, which have at least two and as many as 11 bones comprising each side … [Read more...] about A jaw-dropping conundrum: Why do mammals have a stiff lower jaw?

Posted by UCMP

The UCMP's Education and Outreach team just launched their most recent project: VENOMventure | aVENENOtura. In collaboration with the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum in Lawrence, VENOMVenture premiered over the last two weeks at the Berkeley Public Library.  Read more about the launch and the rave reviews on the UC Berkeley news site. … [Read more...] about The UCMP’s Escape Room teaches fundamentals of evolution

Posted by UCMP

Find the UCMP table on the South Lawn along Campanile Way at the STEM Bonanza Hub along with others from the Berkeley Natural History Museums on Cal Day on Saturday April 22, 2023! New, incoming students and their families are welcome to stop by to see fossils on display and ask about student opportunities. “Meet the T. rex” from 11:00 am -12:00 pm in the atrium of VLSB, 1st floor, in front of the life-size Tyrannosaurus rex cast. UCMP graduate students will be there to answer questions … [Read more...] about UCMP will be participating in STEM Bonanza on Cal Day

Posted by Taormina (Tara) Lepore

THUNK. CA-CHUNK. THUD-THUD-THUD.  Our Toyota sedan was not built for the desert. We had blown a tire, out on the remote highway from the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar to the small city of Dalanzadgad, a six hour drive from north to south through the Gobi Desert.  The three of us were a team of Filipino, American, and Mongolian educators and paleontologists, heading to the Gobi to lead the summer teacher education program and student summer camp in paleontology. The pitted and … [Read more...] about Cross-Cultural Connections in Paleontology

Posted by UCMP

The UCMP is excited to announce the establishment of the William A. Clemens Memorial Fund in Vertebrate Paleontology. It was made possible by generous donors in the UCMP community who care deeply about the museum, its future, and its educational and scientific missions. The annual disbursement from this fund will be used to support UCMP's vertebrate paleontology collections, including the maintenance and curation of fossils, staffing, and its use by students and visiting scholars. This … [Read more...] about Announcing the William A. Clemens Memorial Fund in Vertebrate Paleontology

Posted by UCMP

Director of Education and Outreach Lisa White spent part of the 2023 winter break sailing on the R/V Armstrong with scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and educators from the STEMSEAS (STEM Student Experiences Aboard Ships) program. Sailing from Woods Hole, MA to Pensacola, FL from January 3-11, 2023, the cruise was designed to build partnerships and opportunities between STEMSEAS and the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Lisa’s background and … [Read more...] about Science at sea with STEMSEAS

Posted by UCMP

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

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Visiting

The UCMP is primarily a research museum and our collections are only open to the public during our annual open house on Cal Day. However, we have a limited number of fossil exhibits on display, including a magnificent Tyrannosaurus rex . These can be viewed, free of charge, any time the Valley Life Sciences Building is open. Learn more here.

Contact

1101 Valley Life Sciences Building
Berkeley, CA 94720-4780

Valley Life Sciences Building hours and directions.

Voice: (510) 642-1821
Fax: (510) 642-1822
E-mail: ucmpwebmaster@berkeley.edu