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News & Updates

Posted by Mackenzie Kirchner-Smith and Ixchel Gonzalez-Ramirez

During the summer of 2019 we (graduate students Mackenzie Kirchner-Smith and Ixchel Gonzalez-Ramirez) spent a month working in the Paleobotanical Collections of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in DC as part of the NSF-sponsored Pteridophyte Collection Consortium project (PCC). This project, led by PIs Carl Rothfels, Diane Erwin and Cindy Looy, seeks to digitize more than 1.7 million modern and fossil pteridophyte specimens. During the month at the NMNH we digitized more than 700 … [Read more...] about Back to the Devonian for the Pteridophyte Collection Consortium (PCC) project

Posted by UCMP

What future for turtles?  Our best guide to the future is the study of a group's past.  Senior Museum Scientist Patricia Holroyd, in collaboration with United Kingdom scientists led by Terri Cleary, present a comprehensive new study  in the journal Palaeontology detailing the origin and spread of turtles for the first 250 million years of their evolution.  Read more about the work at the Natural History Museum website.  … [Read more...] about Will turtles survive climate change?

Posted by Tanner Frank

The school year has ended, but with the ongoing pandemic pushing most usual summertime activities off the table, my thoughts have been turning to how I spent my last summer: organizing fishing trips to Nevada. These excursions weren’t exactly spent relaxing on a boat in Tahoe reeling in trout. Rather, my companions and I were kneeling in a defunct quarry under the desert sun, prying apart layers of blindingly white rock in search of the fossils of small fish that once lived in a long-disappeared … [Read more...] about Fossil fishing for clues about a prehistoric invasion

Posted by UCMP

Botanist Dr. Nathalie Nagalingum (California Academy of Sciences) explains how, more than 400 million years ago, early plants played a notable role in adjusting Earth's physical surface as well as our planet's climate. She meets with paleobotanist Dr. Cindy Looy (UCMP & UC Berkeley) to discuss the evidence that scientists currently have to support her story. … [Read more...] about How did plants change our planet?

Posted by UCMP

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the UC Berkeley campus is currently closed and access to the UCMP collections is not possible. We expect access will remain limited through the fall 2020 semester but we will update as information becomes available. You can learn more about the campus closures and updates through the Berkeley COVID-19 website. … [Read more...] about Access to the UCMP collections is restricted

Posted by Jaemin Lee, Graduate Student

Unique and rare deposits in South Korea provide a glimpse of Cretaceous flowering plant ecosystems It has been over a month since the closure of the UC Berkeley campus and the UCMP due to the ongoing pandemic. During the shelter-in-place, I have been fortunate enough to be able to continue research from home. Many images of fossils that I am working on at the moment are from a summer 2019 research trip to South Korea. Thanks to the research award I received from UCMP, I was able to do fieldwork … [Read more...] about South Korea’s rich Cretaceous history: A window into the past

Posted by Josh Zimmt

Having the opportunity to return to a field site is, in many ways, like rewatching a favorite movie series. On your first pass through, everything is unexpected and unfamiliar. For some movies, the amount of information and detail can be overwhelming. On your second pass through, even though you now know the characters, the setting, and the plot, you begin to notice important details that you missed the first time. Each time you rewatch the series, you discover new things and form new ideas, and … [Read more...] about Reading Between the Rocks: The Return to Anticosti

Posted by Ben Muddiman, Ivo Duijnstee and Cindy Looy

The Pennsylvanian (323-299 million years ago) is one of the most interesting time periods in Earth’s history. Giant dragonfly relatives like Meganeura (>2 ft wingspan!), 8-ft-long millipedes named Arthropleura, and early mammal-like reptiles lived in a world that likely had atmospheric oxygen levels well above today’s. These animals roamed a landscape dominated by extensive peat swamps, covering large parts of what was then Euramerica. These swamp forests would look entirely … [Read more...] about Paleontologic Data Fossilized on IBM 8” Floppies

Posted by UCMP

Inspired by UCMP's dedication to science outreach, PhD candidate Sara ElShafie has been exploring new approaches to science communication while conducting her dissertation research in global change biology. Keen to learn how to engage broad audiences through stories, ElShafie started reaching out to filmmakers at Pixar and other studios to learn and adapt cinematic storytelling strategies for science communication. She created a workshop series, "Science Through Story," offering story … [Read more...] about Science through Story, now on YouTube

Posted by Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley Media Relations

Cross-posted from Berkeley News The mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period 252 million years ago — one of the great turnovers of life on Earth — appears to have played out differently and at different times on land and in the sea, according to newly redated fossils beds from South Africa and Australia. New ages for fossilized vertebrates that lived just after the demise of the fauna that dominated the late Permian show that the ecosystem changes began hundreds of thousands of … [Read more...] about In Earth’s largest extinction, land die-offs began long before ocean turnover

Posted by UCMP

A letter from Charles Marshall, Director Dear Friends and Alumni of UCMP, The annual Big Give, which will take place on Thursday, March 12, is a campus-wide opportunity to celebrate and support what makes Berkeley unique and the premier public university in the world.  Your gifts to the UCMP help contribute to excellence in all facets of the museum: research, collections, education and outreach. With the 2020 Big Give we ask for your support for: Graduate and undergraduate … [Read more...] about UCMP Big Give 2020

Posted by UCMP

NEWS RELEASE A new species of quail-sized fossil bird from 44 million year old sediments in Utah fills in a gap in the fossil record of the early extinct relatives of chickens and turkeys, and it shows strong links with other extinct species from Namibia in Southern Africa and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. In their paper in the online scientific journal Diversity, the authors Dr. Thomas Stidham (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of … [Read more...] about New tiny 44 million year old bird fossil links Africa and Asia to Utah

Posted by Walter Alvarez, Professor of the Graduate School, Earth and Planetary Sciences

Big History is the name of the fairly new effort to treat, as a single field of study, all of the past that has led to us human beings. It brings together the regimes of Cosmic, Earth, Life, and Human history, and involves both humanists and scientists. Big History is rich in insights about the human situation and how it has come to be, but it involves time scales that are enormous, compared to those we are used to, and therefore difficult to comprehend and to visualize. ChronoZoom is a way … [Read more...] about The ChronoZoom Time Atlas of Earth History and Big History

Posted by UCMP

The Education and Outreach team has been busy creating interactive resources for educators and teachers. We invite you to explore some of our most recent projects: EPICC Virtual Fieldwork Experiences EPICC virtual fieldwork experiences (VFEs) provide opportunities to virtually visit classic paleontological field sites along the Pacific coast and to explore images and data from specimens that have been collected there. VFEs can combine high resolution and 3-D pictures for exploring an … [Read more...] about Explore UCMP teaching and learning resources

Posted by Cindy Looy & Ivo Duijnstee

In February 2015, The Bearded Lady Project film and photography team boarded a plane and flew to San Francisco. They were carrying a peculiar cargo: 30 beards and mustaches that they picked up at their regional theater prop shop. During their three days on the UC Berkeley campus at the UC Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), they interviewed and photographed about 30 UCMP paleontologists wearing beards. The participating UCMP graduate students, faculty members and museum scientists all had one thing … [Read more...] about The Bearded Ladies Go Berkeley

Posted by UCMP

The UCMP has one of the best collections of multituberculates, a small mammal from the Cretaceous characterized by their very interesting and very bumpy teeth. Luke Weaver, a PhD candidate from the Wilson Lab at the University of Washington visited the museum in Summer of 2018 to check out the collection and further his own research into these interesting creatures. His visit was supported in part by the Doris O. and Samuel P. Welles Research Fund. Check out the video for more on these … [Read more...] about Fossil Feature: Multituberculates

Posted by Kevin Padian

Kangaroos … in Berkeley? That’s right, mate.  You won’t find them leaping around the campus, though.  Because they’re in the Museum of Paleontology’s fossil collections.  In the 1950s, then-curator and professor Ruben A. Stirton decided to go to Australia’s Tirari Desert to look for fossil marsupials.  He wanted to find evidence to answer the question of the origin and spread of marsupials through space and time.  Did they come from Australia, Antarctica, or … [Read more...] about Researchers from Down Under come to UCMP to study our Australian fossils

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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.

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