Archive for the ‘UCMP news’ Category.
We are sad to report the death of longtime UCMP associate Harley Garbani. Garbani collected T. rex and Triceratops specimens and many others.
Read his complete Los Angeles Times obituary to find out more about his wonderful career and association with UCMP.
David Hurt, who is co-advised by Jonathan Stillman and David R. Lindberg, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. David started as a Ph.D. student Berkeley in 2010, and is examining potential effects of ocean acidification on the physiology and behavior of porcelain crabs during their development. For more about David, enjoy his audio slide show.
Allison Stegner, who is advised by Tony Barnosky, has also been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Allison started as a Ph.D. student Berkeley in 2010, and is using the Quaternary paleontological record to understand how past and present-day communities are related.
Emily Lindsey, who is advised by Tony Barnosky, has received the 2011 George D. Louderback award. Her research on the exchange of megafauna between North and South America has taken her into the field in Ecuador and Chile.
Rosemary Romero, who is co-advised by Wayne Sousa and David R. Lindberg, has been awarded the Office of the President's 2011-12 Mentor Research Award. Rosemary came to Berkeley in 2010, and is examining how the abundance of algal propagules contributes to harmful algal blooms in coastal and estuarine communities. For more about Rosemary, enjoy her audio slide show.
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.
The latest edition of the journal Nature includes a paper authored by Tony Barnosky entitled "Has the Earth's sixth mass extinction already arrived?" Co-authors include UCMP's Susumu Tomiya, Brian Swartz, Tiago Quental, Charles Marshall, Jenny McGuire, Emily Lindsey, Kaitlin Maguire, Elizabeth Ferrer and the Integrative Biology department's Nicholas Matzke, Guinevere Wogan and Ben Mersey. They used new paleontological information to make an apples-to-apples comparison between current extinction rates and mass extinctions from the past. The results show that modern extinction rates resemble a mass extinction and reinforce the importance of saving endangered species in order to maintain biodiversity on Earth.
Read more about this exciting research:
Looks like the tyrant lizard wasn't so scary after all.
UCMP's Mark Goodwin and Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, have been working in the late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of Eastern Montana for decades, an area famous for its impressive fossil assemblages including fish, mammals, and dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex.
Based on a census of predator and prey found at several of the time intervals represented in the Hell Creek Formation, Goodwin and Horner concluded that T. rex was far too abundant to be a lion-like top predator. Top predators are usually one-third or one-fourth as abundant as their prey due to their larger energetic requirements. Opportunistic carnivores like hyenas, however, can number twice that of top predators. With the results of their census and no evidence that T. rex was an extra picky or capable hunter, the scientists suggest it likely subsisted on both live and dead animals, exploiting a variety of food sources like the hyena.
Check out the press release to find out more!
Love is in the water, and UCMP's Roy Caldwell has the photos to prove it! The cephalopod resource website TONMO has posted a sequence of Roy's crystal-clear photos depicting a pair of mating Abdopus aculeatus octopuses. Readers can follow this relationship from the first, tentative moments of courtship through to a brood of adorable octopus eggs.
Click through to TONMO for the photo essay and accompanying commentary.
A gomphotherium jaw, from the Blackhawk Quarry
To illustrate what has been found in earlier excavations, UCMP has provided an exhibit of fossil representatives of some of these mammals. The fossils were actually collected at the Blackhawk Ranch Quarry on the eastern slopes of Mount Diablo, but they represent the same fauna as the fossils that have been found at the Caldecott Tunnel.
The exhibit has been developed in cooperation with the Lafayette Historical Society and also includes examples of restorations of the ancient flora and fauna prepared by a local artist, the late William Gordon Huff. Some of these restorations were shown at the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair.
The exhibit will be on display at the Lafayette Library and Learning Center (3491 Mt. Diablo Boulevard) until early March. The Lafayette Historical Society is sponsoring a lecture, "Old Bones in the New Tunnel", to be held at the library on February 16th at 3:00 PM.
If you miss this exhibit, fossils and archives from the exhibit will be on display at UCMP during Cal Day, April 16, 2011, from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM and learn about "who" wandered Berkeley before the Cal Bears!
See more Blackhawk Quarry fossils, and a drawing by Huff at the UCMP Flickr photostream:
We are pleased to announce the receipt of a grant of $236,200 from the Mellon Foundation to catalog our archives The funds are administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) through their "Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives: Building a New Research Environment" program. In recognition that "libraries, archives, and cultural institutions hold millions of items that have never been adequately described," the CLIR awards grants in order to support innovative and efficient description of material considered to be of "high value to scholars."
The grant will support several semesters and summers of graduate support, funding their work in the collections, and will result in increased access to these extraordinary hidden collections. Special thanks to Mark Goodwin, Judy Scotchmoor and Pat Holroyd who were invaluable in putting the proposal together.
The news is finally out! Understanding Evolution and Understanding Science have won the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) award. The prize honors websites that encourage innovation and excellence in science education. We are proud to have been selected from among hundreds of sites to receive this prestigious award — and we are glad to be able to finally let everyone know about it! We’ve been trying to keep it a secret for almost a year now ...
Check out our essay in the December 2 issue of ScienceXpress, and keep an eye out for the official Science publication in the next few weeks. Most importantly, be sure to visit Understanding Evolution and Understanding Science to see what all the fuss is about!
The Understanding Evolution/Understanding Science team (left to right): Roy Caldwell, Josh Frankel, David Lindberg, Judy Scotchmoor, Anna Thanukos and Dave Smith
Since its launch in 2004, the audience of the Understanding Evolution website has continued to grow, and the site is evolving in response to the needs of that audience. The site now averages more than a million page accesses per month during the academic year, but additionally there is a large international audience that is visiting UE "sister sites." Through partnerships with educational organizations abroad, the UE site is now available in Spanish and Turkish and most recently has been translated into Tibetan to be distributed to Buddhist monks as part of the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative.
Jim Wynn, the Project Coordinator of the initiative, shared the following email with us:
"Emory University just completed a two-day International Conference on Tibetan Buddhism attended by over 400 delegates which coincided with a three-day visit to Emory of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. While His Holiness was there, the President of Emory University officially presented him with three science textbooks that had been prepared for use with the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative — teaching science to Tibetan monastics in Dharamsala, India. The goal of the multi-year project is to develop a science program that can be used in the Tibetan monasteries and nunneries throughout India. One of the books presented was a printed and translated version of the Berkeley developed Evolution 101 website. Each page is printed in English and followed immediately by the same page translated into Tibetan."
We are anxiously awaiting receipt of a copy of the book and will be working with our partners at Emory to facilitate the development of an on-line version in the near future. Translations have also been initiated into Portuguese and French.
