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1996

1996 was our busiest year yet, including a move to a new machine and the creation of more than 60 new on-line exhibits.

November 1996
  • November 20: Our on-line catalog of vertebrate type material is working again. Search for tyrannosaurs or your favorite group.
  • November 18: Want to get a job in paleontology? Interested in paleontological events? Check out Paleonet Pages West, more than just information about the PALEONET listserver!
  • November 17: PaleoBios, the journal of the Museum of Paleontology, has just updated its back issue list.
October 1996
  • October 14: We have added many new links to our lists of on-line collection catalogs. Check out the expanded lists for Fungi, Algae, and Microbiology.
  • October 9: At last, the section on the anapsids is in place. Find out what a pareiasaur or a procolophonid is, and how they share certain features with the turtles.
September 1996
  • September 29: A new page has been added to our natural history listings. This one is a listing of publishers and book dealers in natural history: to satisfy the cravings of paleontological bibliophiles, like the author.
  • September 27: We have extensively revised our pages on diatoms, adding many nice new pictures.
  • September 25: Yet another biography has gone up on our History of Evolutionary Thought exhibit. This one profiles Adam Sedgwick, the great English geologist of the 19th century (and, incidentally, Charles Darwin's geology professor).
  • September 13: Due to problems beyond our control, we have had to take down the old server, ucmp1.berkeley.edu. This means that the UCMP collection catalogs are not currently available, and some features of our exhibits, such as PaleoPals, the Guestbook, and the Certificates for T. rex donors, do not work. Many pages linked from this one will no longer be available. We will be working to remedy any problems this causes, and ask for your patience. If there's a page you want to see and can't find, try replacing "ucmp1.berkeley.edu" in the header with "ucmp.berkeley.edu". Please contact us if you find any broken links or other problems with the site.
  • September 7: UCMP is THE PLACE to be. Take a walk with us on the trail through time on September 28. Enrollment is limited, so register now! Also, join us for three lectures celebrating our 75th anniversary. Learn about the origin of our earliest ancestors from noted physical anthropologist Professor Tim White on October 10, the first in the series.
  • September 6: You can now learn about Mynheer Antony van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant from Holland (who also made some of the most important scientific discoveries of all time...)
  • September 2: We now have a page on our server set aside for bromeliads, a group of New World plants with many unusual adaptations...
August 1996
  • August 30: Learn about the early history of biology and geology with a page on Aristotle, still a great scientist after 2,300 years.
  • August 25: Explore yet another small but interesting branch of the tree of life, with our page on sipunculans, otherwise known as "peanut worms."
  • August 24: Paleontology, evolution, biogeography, and many other fields were and still are being revolutionized by plate tectonics, a.k.a. "continental drift." It was Alfred Wegener who formulated this far-reaching theory. Check out our new biography of Wegener to learn more.
  • August 23: A short exhibit on the life and work of William Paley, the 18th-century theologian who influenced Darwin deeply, is now up on our server.
  • August 22: The Web Lift to Taxa has been framed! The new version of the lift should make it easier to find exhibits in our phylogeny wing. For those without frames capable browsers, the old version is still available.
  • August 21: PaleoBios goes online! Check out a paper from the most recent issue.
  • August 14: The UCMP data model, a roadmap to the types of information that we maintain in dealing with our collections, has been updated. This model is mostly for our professional colleagues, but we encourage anyone with an interest in museum collection management to visit.
  • August 9: PaleoBios Volume 17, Issue 1 is now out. Check out the abstracts online!
July 1996
  • July 17: Even as the move proceeds, we're adding new pages and updating old ones. Delve a bit into the history of UCMP and its collections with our new biographies of John C. Merriam, one of the most famous paleontologists to work at Berkeley, and of Annie Alexander, who not only spurred the foundation of the UCMP and supported paleontological research throughout her life, but became one of the most intrepid field paleontologists in UCMP's history.
  • July 12: The move to our new machine is now well under way. Read this page for an update on what has moved and to where. Our latest moves include the Geology Wing, Glossary, and Plant pages.
June 1996
  • June 23: We have been experimenting with animation. Check out a rotating three dimensional reconstruction of the radular sac. Whats a radular sac? You'll know soon enough!
  • June 17: The lilies now have a page on our server.
  • June 6: We've completely redone the list of Botanical Collections, breaking the list into smaller and more manageable sections.
May 1996
  • May 31: We've added several new pictures and pages to our exhibit on William Gordon Huff, the artist who created the sculptures of extinct animals that now grace our home page.
  • May 20: The Phylogenetics Resources page has been expanded and overhauled. We have added many new links, including a page of links to meetings of interest to phylogeneticists.
  • May 9: The pages that describe our new Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope have now been moved to the new server. Among other things, they feature a remarkable image gallery. Check 'em out.
  • May 7: All our WWW pages dealing with collection catalogs: our own and elsewhere: have been transferred to the new server. We've taken the opportunity to expand the list of remote collections and databases and tighten up the file structure just a bit...
  • May 2: Check out our new biography of Georgius Agricola, one of the founders of paleontology in the Renaissance.
  • May 1: Interested in molluscs!? So are we! Check out Mollia, a set of resources for snail lovers.
April 1996
  • April 30: PaleoNet is a set of services started by Norm MacLeod at the Natural History Museum in London. UCMP has taken over running the PaleoNet listserver and now mirrors the PaleoNet WWW pages.
  • April 22: The Web Lift has been redesigned to accommodate more links. It now links directly to the Help page, Glossary, and out Home page.
  • April 8: The section on the history of evolutionary thought has been transferred to the new server. A couple of new biographies are in the works, so stay tuned!
  • April 6: We are moving! Yes, that's right. We are slowly but surely migrating to our new machine, ucmp.berkeley.edu. This will be a long process, but we were starting to run out of space on our main server. The move will eventually result in much more extensive exhibits, with faster and more reliable service. We'll keep you posted on the status of the move so you don't miss anything.
  • March 1996
    • March 4: Our page of Web resources in phylogenetics and systematics has been expanded and formatted.
    • March 3: It seems that quite a number of Web reviewers and aficionados, including PointCom, Magellan, C|Net, JumpCity, and many others have been giving our server their highest ratings. We've put up a reviews page to acknowledge those who have paid us these honors, to list the awards and reviews we've received, and to put all those nifty Web badges. We thank all our reviewers for their compliments, and we hope to continue building our Website bigger and better than ever before!
    • March 2: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is one of the more underrated figures in the history of evolutionary biology. A biography of Lamarck is now available on our server.
    • March 1: FRAMES! UCMP is taking advantage of some of the new features supported by the latest version of Netscape. One of these is the use of frames, where the browser window can be broken into independent windows or frames, such that links in one frame can bring up text or images in an adjacent frame. If you already have Netscape 2.0 check out the new pages on crinoids, or "sea lilies," the dominant echinoderms of Paleozoic time. If you do not have the latest version you can still see the new crinoid exhibit without frames. To download a free copy of Netscape 2.0 follow this link to the Netscape home page.
    February 1996
    • February 29: UCMP is proud to announce that the I-way 500, which ranks and reviews top Web sites in 20 categories, has rated our Web site as the #1 science site on the Web. We thank all the people at I-way for this honor!
    • February 28: We continue to fill out the picture of pre-Darwinian ideas in evolution and paleontology with a biography of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a contemporary of Cuvier with some evolutionary ideas of his own.
    • February 27: Scorpions are among the oldest groups of land animals; read about these ancient predators now on our server.
    • February 26: The great 19th-century scientist and statesman Georges Cuvier, who among other accomplishments founded vertebrate paleontology, now has a biography on our site. Watch our exhibit on the history of evolutionary thought; some more biographies will be coming up this week.
    • February 25: If spiders give you the heebie-jeebies, you may prefer to check out our new page on myriapods. On the other hand, you might not.
    • February 24: Those amazing spiders have been given a larger page.
    • February 23: The chelicerates are undergoing a revision, and now have a page on their ecology.
    • February 22: We have added a new section to the "About This Museum" page featuring the Museum Research Facilities. The Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) Laboratory is the first of several research facilities to be presented.
    • February 21: Stromatolites flourished, eukaryotes diversified, the air became breathable, and animals appeared...the Proterozoic was a fine time to be alive.
    • February 20: Our calendar of coming events in the paleontological community, including digs, field trips, and conferences, has been updated. Find out what's going on in the world of paleontology, and write us if you know of something we should include.
    • February 19: We have redrawn the bacterial cladogram, to bring it in line with current work, and have added a new page on the Spirochaetes.
    • February 18: The Pogonophora are the first new animal phylum to go up in some time, but you'll now find these weird worms of the deep ocean on their own page.
    • February 17: It isn't easy to summarize about the ecology of all plants, but we've tried to anyway.
    • February 16: The trimerophytes are believed to be the fossil ancestors of the ferns, sphenophytes, and seed plants, and so are a key group in understanding the evolution of land plants.
    • February 15: A number of early vascular plants have gone extinct; one of these, the zosterophyllophytes, now has a page on our server.
    • February 14: Sphenophytes! They may be a little rough around the edges, but that's cause they've got silica in their skin, and that's even worse than getting it in your shorts. Three hundred million years ago they included tall trees; their descendants are the humble horsetails and scouring rushes.
    • February 13: The Lycophyta include a number of modern herbs, but in the Carboniferous Period some lycophytes grew to be large trees which formed swamp forests. Read about these fascinating plants from the past in their new exhibit.
    • February 12: Volume 8: Botany has been added to the UCMP Glossary. This kicks off a week of those new plant exhibits you've been waiting for.
    • February 11: We've added some information about the major groups of anthozoans: cnidarians, that is. Stop by for a look at sea anemones, soft corals, hard corals, and other denizens of the seas.
    • February 10: It's a long way from amphioxus to us, but they're still chordates, and that makes them close relatives.
    • February 9: Artiodactyls include deer, camels, giraffes, pigs, and many other familiar organisms. Their exhibit has been expanded to six pages, including a special page on the Case of the Irish Elk.
    • February 8: We are breaking up our old ungulates page into its component groups: the Artiodactyla and Perissodactyla. The first to go up, the Perissodactyla, include horses, rhinos, tapirs: and the largest land mammal of all time, to name a few.
    • February 7: The embrithopods may not include many species, but they were rather large herbivores!
    • February 6: Our Carnivora page has been expanded into a six-page display, including a page on Sabretooths!
    • February 5: Eutherian Mammals now have fuller coverage on our server, with ecology, fossil, and systematic information. Watch this week for additional revisions to various groups.
    • February 4: The Neognathae include most of the birds alive today.
    • February 3: The Palaeognathae include the ostriches, emus, and kiwis.
    • February 2: The birds have finally been given a much needed revision and expansion. Watch for additional pages in this new exhibit over the weekend!
    • February 1: We have finally added ecology and morphology pages to our exhibit on kelps and other brown algae.
    January 1996
    • January 31: Red algae have played several important roles in the modern world as well as in the past. Do you know what those roles are? Find out in their newly expanded exhibit.
    • January 30: The Hydrozoa have also been revised, and while we were at it, we shrank some of the image files on the Introductory pages to the Cnidaria; we hope this will make it possible to load these pages much more quickly.
    • January 29: The jellyfish have had a major overhaul of their exhibit. Check out the new pages on these fascinating animals.
    • January 28: The Ctenophora are graceful, transparent, and often bioluminescent. They are also covered by an exhibit on our server.
    • January 27: We have compiled a list of our special exhibits to make them easier to find. This list may be accessed directly from the UCMP Subway.
    • January 26: A great zoologist and geologist, shaper of American science policy, founder of one of the world's great museums, and a lifelong opponent of Darwin and of evolution...Read our biography of Louis Agassiz, the last of the scientific creationists, and a surprisingly influential figure in the history of evolutionary thought.
    • January 25: "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" may be Ernst Haeckel's most famous saying, but it was not his only one, nor his only contribution to evolutionary thought. Find out more about Haeckel's influence and his ideas about both evolution and politics.
    • January 24: Did the Scottish horticulturalist and political writer Patrick Matthew really develop the theory of natural selection thirty years before Darwin? You be the judge.
    • January 23: John Ray, the influential 17th-century botanist and theologian, comes next in our series of biographies.
    • January 22: We kick off what looks to be a week dominated by biographies of scientists prominent in the history of evolutionary thought. Check out our expanded biography of Carl Linné, a.k.a. Carolus Linnaeus.
    • January 21: "P"-week at UCMP ends by finally making in-roads on the annelids, with an exhibit on polychaetes.
    • January 20: Primates, primates, primates start with "P". So do the progymnosperms, extinct relatives of the seed plants.
    • January 19: The Pleistocene, a much used page on our server, now has informative text and links to related sites.
    • January 18: PaleoBios has put out a new issue recently. The abstracts for that issue are now on-line!
    • January 17: There is a "P" at the beginning of Phylogenetic Systematics, an exhibit of ours that has been greatly expanded.
    • January 16: "P" is also for Pholidota, the pangolins, a group of placental mammals.
    • January 15: This week in "What's New" at UCMP is brought to you by the letter "P". We begin with a new plant group, the Psilophyta.
    • January 14: "Nature red in tooth and claw..." The Carnivora exhibit has been updated and expanded. We have also created Sabretooths!, a special exhibit on some of the fiercest-looking mammals of all time (including the State Fossil of California).
    • January 13: We have updated our Shark Exhibit and also updated some information on the shark man himself, Dr. Douglas Long.
    • January 12: We have finally updated and corrected our pages on monotremes and marsupials, adding some much-needed images.
    • January 11: Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a bat, it's a pterosaur...No, by Darwin, it's actually our brand spanking new set of exhibits on vertebrate flight! Hallelujah! Find out exactly how those buggers fly, how and why they evolved from nonflying ancestors, and what makes a glider glide and a flyer fly. To celebrate this, we've also updated and improved our section on the pterosaurs, a group near and dear to UCMP researchers' hearts. Icarus lives!
    • January 10: When he wasn't painting masterpieces, dissecting cadavers, or designing cannons and flying machines, Leonardo da Vinci studied paleontology and geology. Check out our new exhibit on his groundbreaking contributions.
    • January 9: The new Navigational Guide to the exhibits on our server provides an explanation of how our pages are organized, and provides instruction information and hints on how to get around. The Guide includes a special tutorial on navigating the Phylogeny Wing.
    • January 8: If you are a first-time visitor to our museum, we now have a page for you. You may find this page helpful even if you are a surfing veteran.
    • January 5: Interested in evolution? Learn about evolution from the experts. On March 9 and March 10, nine pre-eminent paleontologists and evolutionists will come together to teach a short course on evolution and you are invited!
    • January 4: We have added yet another biography to our Evolution exibit. Find out how Thomas Malthus, a Political Economist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contributed to Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Also, we have fleshed out a biography of Edward Drinker Cope.
    • January 3: Our Curator of Fossil Plants, Nan Crystal Arens, has completed her homepage. If you like Shelties have a look at her "Etc." page. Nan is also an Assistant Professor in the Integrative Biology Department.

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