What are bug-men and how did their existence benefit UCMP? Watch and listen to this slideshow about an obscure link recently discovered by UCMP micropaleontologist Ken Finger.

Click cover page below to download the full article.

Unbeknownst to some, UCMP is home to a large collection of amber-encased insect specimens. While some of the most famous amber fossils come from the region south of the Baltic Sea, the majority of UCMP’s amber collection hails from the Chiapas region of Mexico, illuminating never before captured environments of the Western Hemisphere.

Spanning nearly two decades from the mid-1950s through the 1970s, efforts to collect and study these specimens were spearheaded through collaboration between the UC Museum of Entomology’s Paul D. Hurd, Jr. and Ray F. Smith and UCMP’s J. Wyatt Durham. With the help of friends near and abroad through years of fieldwork and research, the Mexican amber project was able to paint a fresh picture of Chiapas insect diversity during the Miocene. The project drew together experts from around the world to identify and describe the insects encased in amber, resulting in scientific publications, radio broadcasts, magazine articles, and more.

Check back to this blog often for inside looks into the amber project brought to you by the Council on Library and Information Resources Hidden Collections Grant and the UCMP archives.

Susan Tremblay (left) and paleobotanist Carol Hotton (right) talking liverworts

On a cold Berkeley morning late in March paleobotanist Cindy Looy and grad student Susan Tremblay hopped on a plane to Washington DC. Their goal was not to enjoy the gorgeous spring weather and peaking cherry blossoms, but instead to search for clues to the early evolution of plants in the collections of the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Devonian liverworts and Permian conifers were on the menu.

Pallaviciniites devonicus, described by Francis Hueber in 1961, is one of the oldest known fossil liverworts. The shale from which the fossils originated, a locality in Eastern New York, has been completely quarried and used for road repairs. Until recently the taxon was thought to exist only in the form of six type slides. However, on a previous visit to the NMNH, Devonian specialist Carol Hotton pointed Cindy to several cabinets with the original shales collected by Hueber. One of our goals was to re-examine the material.

Cindy Looy taking notes on Early Permian conifer branches

At first glance the shales don’t seem to contain any fossils at all. But when looked at with a stereo microscope using polarized light a variety of plant fossils, including liverwort thalli, become clearly visible. A selection of this material was shipped to the UCMP, where preparations are being made to free the fossils by dissolving the matrix. P. devonicus and other Paleozoic liverwort taxa have dark cells scattered across their surfaces. These are hypothesized to be homologous to the scattered, oil body containing-cells of some extant liverworts. Susan will use morphometrics and biogeochemical information to test possible homology. This might elucidate the evolution and possible function of these mysterious organelles found only in liverworts, the sister group to the rest of the land plants.

Cin’s quest to reconstruct the early history of the Paleozoic conifers also continued. The earliest conifers are small trees with a growth habit similar to that of extant Norfolk Island Pine. They played a prominent role in the composition of plant communities in the equatorial Euramerican floral realm during the Late Carboniferous and Early Permian. Conifers generally fossilize as leaves or isolated shoots, or fragments thereof. The specimens studied were collected by Cindy and NMNH colleagues and originate from an Early Permian seed-plant-dominated flora from Texas. The presence of complete branch systems provides valuable information about the life history of the plants that produced them. New finds from New Mexico were loaned for further study at the Looylab.

It's that time of year we've all been waiting for: Cal Day!

This Saturday marks the one day a year UCMP opens its doors to the public and plays host to a number of events aimed to expose all those who are interested to the fascinating world of fossils.

Stop by the Valley Life Sciences Building for festivities that range from digging for bones to learning about climate change. Found a fossil you need identified? Our experts have set up shop to help you out with just that. Don't forget to pick up tickets for guided tours of the museum collections early in the day (they run out fast!) and stop by the t-shirt table to check out this year's new design featuring the ever-charismatic Metasequoia.

For our complete schedule of events, click here!

Cal Day is a campus-wide event. Visit the Cal Day website for more information and activities.

Yesterday was the first ever National Fossil Day and UCMP pulled out all the stops!

Come check out the new online exhibit, Fossils in our parklands: Examples of UCMP service and stewardship, featuring fossils in UCMP's collection from national and state parks in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Montana. The museum played a pivotal role in the creation of some of the featured parks and we're happy to highlight our shared histories.

Additionally, the 2011 UCMP Fossil Treasures Calendar is now available for purchase! Click here to take a peek at the stunning photos included in the calendar and to find out how to purchase it online. If you're in the area, you can drop by in person for a discounted price. Remember, proceeds help fund graduate student research in the field of paleontology.

Finally, have a look behind the scenes at our in-house celebration...

(Event photos courtesy of Nathalie Nagalingum.)

For many paleobiologists summer is that part of the year during which data is gathered in its purest form: fossils. Such summers may take you in diametrically opposite directions, though. Some bring broadly boasted outdoor adventures of fieldwork. Others, however, take you deeper and deeper into the collection labyrinths in the dark bowls of natural history museums around the globe. Despite what others may let you believe - and don’t tell anyone we told you - fieldwork is often boring, tedious work, the outcome of which - if any - is generally unknown. Sometimes long after you have made it back to the lab - as is the case for most palynological expeditions - you still have no clue if the trip was successful or not.

Digging deep in museum collections, on the other hand, can be surprisingly exciting. It is like treasure hunting with the guarantee of success. Now when you tour the big museums in the world, you’re bound to run into fellow hunters. Wherever you may go, you always run in to other members of our tiny community. They are like snowbirds that tour the same limited number of Arizonian RV parks in winter. This year we realized: we’ve joined this small herd of museum nomads. Our trip this summer to the Museum für Naturkunde in former East Berlin was no exception. On the first day of our visit Harvard’s Andy Knoll gave a talk, and we saw Scotsman and paleontologist Allistair McG striding the hallways, a sight we had seen before during our stay at the Smithsonian’s NMNH.

The species that brought us to Berlin is Pleuromeia sternbergii - a 250 million year old quillwort. P. sternbergii is one of the few plant species that actually thrived during the aftermath of the end-Permian crisis, the largest mass extinction ever recorded. From the moment we heard of the plant, we were intrigued by the incredible success of this paleobotanical oddball. Word has it that the first Pleuromeiawas discovered in the 1830s when - during a repair - a sandstone block fell from the Cathedral of Magdeburg and broke into pieces on the pavement (Mägdefrau, 1968). The accident revealed a piece of fossil Pleuromeia stem; nine years later first described by count Georg zu Münster as a Sigillaria species. Fortunately for us, the quarry that produced the stones that built the cathedral was known to be close to the nearby town of Bernburg. Many more important specimens have been found in the same quarry since, and that’s exactly what we were after in Berlin.

Typical Pleuromeia fossils look like a small baseball bat, often with a spirally arranged pattern of dimples on it. These are almost always sandstone casts (infillings) of decayed Pleuromeia stems. Since the decay of these lycopsid stems occurs in distinct phases - starting from the inside-outward, depending on the resilience of concentric tissue layers – virtually all remains are casts of inner stem tissues layers. Now among the many published papers on Pleuromeia sternbergii - the first ones starting in the late 1800s - there was one of by Mägdefrau (1931) that figured a rare feature: the detailed leaf scars on the outside of a Pleuromeia stem. This is crucial information for a new reconstruction we plan to make of P. sternbergii. However, for most of the 20th century this important specimen was considered lost, until someone recently rediscovered it in Berlin. So we had to see it.

While walking through the hallways of the 121 year old museum building, we stared in the face of a Brachiosaurus brancai, the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton (really, it's in the Guinness book of records), walked past a wooden closet decorated with Paleozoic sea lilies and fossil horsetails in wood carvings, and saw many nice old paleo reconstructions. A stone staircase led the way to the attic of the museum; that’s where the Mesozoic paleobotany collections are housed. The collections space is not air conditioned, and it was around 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Up on the attic it was quite a bit warmer, so we had to take care not to spill little streams of sweat on the fossils. Luckily, a small table fan was already performing its duty. We sat down and started browsing though three cabinets with Buntsandstein collections.

Mesozoic plant curator Barbara Mohr very modestly apologized that the collection was not very extensive, but we couldn’t believe our eyes. They turned out to have a huge number of specimens, most of which were collected in the 19th century. Many of the specimens showed important features that have never been published on. Beside the unique specimen with detailed features of the outside of the stem, we found three more specimens. There was a lot of reproductive material in the collection as well - terminal cones, isolated sporophyls and dime to quarter-sized sporangia. Moreover, a short stack of drawers contained hundreds leaf fragments. Now leaves have hardly been figured in Pleuromeia publications, so that was something we knew very little about. For two days, we felt like two little kids in a candy store, photographing as much as possible.

Ceci n’est pas une Pleuromeia
Overseeing this enormous collection, we realized how far off we were with our earlier whole-plant reconstruction of Pleuromeia (see fig.). Now we need to get started on a new one a.s.a.p. Of course, each illustrated reconstruction of an extinct organism or landscape is a hypothesis, and should be treated as such. However, such graphic hypotheses seem almost immune to the natural selection of other memes such as more conceptual, verbal hypotheses. That is because most ‘users’ are not so much interested in the intellectual merit of the hypothesis, but are looking for a pretty picture of an old dead thing. Therefore, falsified but pretty reconstructions have a very slow decay rate, or may even grow in importance. Thus, falsifiability - the one thing that sets scientific claims apart from most non-scientific ones - is continuously threatened by esthetics... The fact that in most reconstructions it is impossible to see the degree of accuracy of the various depicted components adds to the problem. In an ideal world all reconstructions come with an integrated disclaimer or are all just really ugly. Until then, we’d better make sure that each new reconstruction looks better than the predecessor it replaces.

Karl Mägdefrau 1934. Zur Morphologie und phylogenetischen Bedeutung der fossilen Pflanzengattung Pleuromeia. Beih. Bot. Centralbl. 48: 119-140.

Karl Mägdefrau 1968. Paläobiologie der Pflanzen. 4th edition, Fischer, Stuttgart, 549 pp.

Elemental map of a cross-sectional view of the modern minke whale baleen. Image: Mark Goodwin.

Two years ago I approached UCMP Assistant Director Mark Goodwin and asked if he had any room for some student help in his research. I had no previous experience in paleontology, just a passion for learning about dinosaurs and biology. Now, as a third-year graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, I work on a variety of projects with Mark and the UCMP. For my own research, I study the micro- and nano-scale features in fossil bone with electron microscopy. I have always enjoyed interdisciplinary work, and the opportunity to use cutting edge X-ray and electron microscopy techniques to uncover new knowledge about the preservation of fossilized structures is very exciting to me.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which sits overlooking the UC Berkeley campus from atop the Berkeley hills, offers many amazing opportunities to conduct state-of-the-art science. In particular, the Advanced Light Source (ALS) offers a variety of techniques for analyzing material properties, for studying the structure of biological specimens or molecules, or for investigating chemical reactions in real time. All of these techniques use X-ray light, which is a higher-energy form of light than the visible light that our eyes can see.

UCMP Assistant Director Mark Goodwin has been using several techniques at the ALS to study a variety of fossil and modern samples. Most recently, Mark investigated the elemental composition and physical structures of a sample of 5.8 million-year-old fossil whale baleen and then compared it to a sample of modern minke whale baleen.

Baleen whales don’t use teeth to catch and chew their food; instead they use hair-like baleen to strain microscopic organisms from the water. The hair-like structures of baleen are actually small tubules composed of concentric, alternating layers of keratin and hydroxyapatite. Keratin is the same tough protein found in fingernails, and hydroxyapatite is the same mineral that makes bones strong. Just as fossilized bones are altered from their original state, in fossil baleen the keratin and hydroxyapatite can be replaced by other minerals.

That’s where the X-ray absorption techniques at the ALS come in. Because whale baleen has such a large protein component, like muscle or skin, it usually is not preserved during fossilization. The fossil whale baleen that Mark analyzed, with the help of ALS scientists Sirine Fakra and Matthew Marcus, is an incredibly rare sample. Two techniques were used to study the preservation of this remarkable fossil whale baleen, including (1) elemental analysis to spatially map where a variety of different elements are in the baleen and (2) X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) to discern the chemical structure of the elements present. In both cases, the data must be compared to the modern minke whale baleen, or the standard, to assess what has actually changed during fossilization.

An example elemental map of a cross-sectional view of the modern minke baleen can be seen in the figure. The colors each represent a different element present in the baleen and they highlight the concentric circular structure of the baleen tubules. The maps show us that the keratin protein rings in the fossil baleen have largely been replaced by mineral. The original hydroxyapatite rings are still there, too, although some elemental substitutions have occurred in the mineral structure.

From this data we now know the secret behind the preservation of this amazing, rare fossil baleen discovery! The keratin was replaced by mineral, which preserved the three-dimensional structure of the original whale baleen – the mineral prevented the tubules from flattening under pressure in the rocky fossil bed. Measuring the characteristics of the three-dimensional structure, like tubule diameter and thickness, Mark was able to determine that this fossil whale is evolutionarily related to the modern minke whale. This one piece of fossil baleen, therefore, has taught us two lessons: (1) how baleen fossilizes to preserve its original structure and (2) that this extinct whale is related to the modern minke whale.

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CT scan of fossil baleen, courtesy of Mark Goodwin.

The UCMP Invertebrates Collection includes over 31,000 catalogued specimens! Corals, crabs, bivalves, snails, ammonites… both fossil and recent — if it doesn't have a backbone, it's in this collection. I am a UCMP and Integrative Biology graduate student and have been assisting with curation of the Invertebrate Collection. I catalogue and label specimens, process loan requests, manage the Invertebrates Collection database, curate private collections that are donated to the UCMP, and do numerous other small tasks. This might sound tedious, but I really enjoy the process of curation and am constantly exposed to exciting and unique inverts. Why am I interested in animals without backbones? Well, I was hooked after my first introduction to them during an Invertebrate Zoology course, while I was an undergraduate at Rutgers University. Since taking that class, I have traveled all around the world working on projects that focus on invertebrates, including crustaceans and mollusks in the kelp forests off of Alaska; gastropods, cephalopods, and corals in Bermuda; and bivalves in Thailand. My current research takes me to the islands in the Caribbean Sea and Western Atlantic. (Read more about my research on Caribbean inverts in my previous UCMP blog post!)

The UCMP Invertebrates Collection's 31,000 cataloged specimens may sound like a lot, but the collection contains far more than 31,000 individual invertebrates. The actual holdings are nearly impossible to accurately estimate because a single specimen number could be associated with 100 individuals.  Why do we keep so many individuals of the same species from a single locality? Well, having more than one individual is extremely useful to researchers, especially when they are investigating the morphological variation of a species, because the quality of the preservation can vary from specimen to specimen.

The collection consists of specimens that were collected by museum scientists, faculty curators, and graduate students in the course of their research, as well as specimens that were donated to the museum. Some of the major holdings within the UCMP Invertebrates collection include the USGS fossil invertebrate collection, the Crawfordsville crinoid collection, the Geological Survey of California fossil invertebrate collection, the Lambert modern coral collection. For more information about the special collections within the UCMP, please check out this article written by Jere Lipps, one of our Faculty Curators.

Working as Graduate Student Researcher in the UCMP has allowed me to experience what it is like to be a museum scientist, which is something that I may want to do after I finish my PhD. Also, working in the collections has exposed me to all sorts of amazing fossils that I never would have seen otherwise, including Tessarolax sp. (marine gastropods of the Cretaceous), the strange organisms of the Vendian, and rugose corals of the Permian, to name a few.

Check back to the UCMP blog later this fall and spring for more posts about my work with the Invertebrates Collection!

The UCMP has hosted several Flat Stanleys this year, as part of the Year of Science 2009. Flat Stanley is a fictional character from a children’s book, written by Jeff Brown in 1964. In the original story, Stanley is a little boy who is flattened when a bulletin board above his bed falls on top of him. He finds that, in his new flattened state, he is able to have many great adventures by being mailed from place to place in an envelope. Inspired by this story, the Flat Stanley project began as a classroom exercise in an elementary school in Canada and has now grown into a communication network among primary school students around the world. In a variation of this idea, students in Piedmont, California made paper Flat Stanleys and sent them to Berkeley to learn about scientific research on campus. Three of these Stanleys came to visit the UCMP.

The first Stanley to visit in 2009 was hosted by Kaitlin Maguire, a member of the Barnosky lab. Kaitlin showed Stanley the skull of a Columbian mammoth from the Pleistocene of California, and took Stanley’s photo next to one of the mammoth’s teeth. You can check out Stanley’s full adventure with Kaitlin and the mammoth here.

The next Stanley was hosted by Jann Vendetti, a member of the Hickman Lab. Jann took Stanley with her to one of the classes taught in Integrative Biology, called Principles in Paleontology. Stanley got to see a lot of invertebrate fossils, and learned how paleontologists measure the size and shape of animals in the fossil record. See Stanley’s full adventure with Jann here .

The last Stanley to visit the UCMP was hosted by Susumu Tomiya, who is also a member of the Barnosky lab. Susumu introduced Stanley to Flat Darwin, whose real-life counterpart would have celebrated his 200^th birthday this year! Flat Darwin took Stanley on a grand tour of the UCMP collections, with a special emphasis on the fossil mammals of South America. One of the highlights was the glyptodont, a giant, extinct relative of the armadillo. You can read about Stanley’s visit with Susumu, Flat Darwin, and the mammals of South America here.

This isn’t the first time Flat Stanley has visited the UCMP — to read about his previous adventures, click here.

A few months ago, the UCMP’s Tyrannosaurus rex broke a nail. The right claw mysteriously went missing. We needed to replace it, but obviously the standard-issue drugstore press-on nail just wouldn’t do. We had to re-construct a new right claw by making a copy of the intact left claw.

Danny Anduza, a UCMP volunteer, carried out the claw restoration. First, he mixed up a rubbery substance and painted it over the T. rex’s left claw, to make a mold. Once the rubber hardened, he carefully sliced it and removed it from the claw. Next, Danny used the mold to make a new claw. He mixed up some resin and poured it into the rubber mold. Once the resin had set, Danny painted the new claw with brown paint — the same paint that was used to paint the rest of the T. rex in 1995. Danny attached the new claw to the finger bone using a special kind of hot glue, formulated to bond plastic to plastic.

Now that its claw has been repaired, the T. rex can resume hunting prey after we’ve all gone home for the night. Or sneaking into the classrooms and scratching the chalkboards.