William Gordon Huff Gallery

Huff produced several bas-reliefs for the Museum of Paleontology's exhibit at the Exposition of 1939 and 1940, including the relief depicting bison and lions that now graces our home page. The one shown on the right depicts a phororhacoid, a large, flightless, predatory bird of the Cenozoic. Like most of the sculptures that Huff created for the paleontological display at the Exposition, its whereabouts are currently unknown, and it was probably destroyed.
Huff was not only an accomplished sculptor; he produced many fine drawings as well. This one depicts a mosasaur, a giant marine reptile of the Mesozoic era. Mosasaurs shared the sea with other giant marine reptiles, such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. They were actually fairly close relatives of the lizards of today, and were most closely related to the varanids -- the lizard family that includes the "Komodo dragon" of today.
In the 1950s, UCMP mounted an expedition to collect fossil marsupials from Australia. This is Huff's somewhat satirical view of what these marsupials of the past may have looked like. One of them, shown at the right, bears a suspicious resemblance to Dr. Stirton, the expedition leader. Huff named these magnificent beasts of the past Homomarsupialansis humbugi, and wrote at the lower right, 'Friend Stirt -- This is a restoration of one marsupial fossil you will have a hard time finding in Australia. Bill Huff'.