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.)

The shells of abundant, tiny, marine organisms known as foraminifera deform when exposed to environmental pollutants. When foraminifera die they leave behind these shells as a record of the conditions through which they lived.  A team of researchers, including professor emeritus/UCMP curator Jere Lipps, reported on the usefulness of forams as environmental indicators after studying the impact of the 1978 Amoco Cadiz oil spill on the Brittany Coast. This work was presented on September 7 by Lipps' colleague, Marie-Thérèse Vénec-Peyré at the international Forams 2010 symposium in Bonn, Germany.

Developing a better understanding of forams as indicators of pollution gives scientists a powerful tool to measure the impact of future enviornmental disasters. Read more in this UC Berkeley News press release.

The Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is soliciting applications for a tenure track position (Assistant Professor) in Paleobiology. The successful candidate will also serve as a curator in the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

If you're interested, please read the complete job listing.

We are pleased to announce the receipt of an unrestricted gift in the amount of $25,000 from The Whitman Institute to support the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science (COPUS) project.

Being involved in COPUS has been an extraordinary experience, but it is not all that easy to explain – probably because it is so simple. It is all about connecting people and ideas and the common thread is sharing science.

The idea for COPUS began in 2006 at UCMP with an NSF-funded meeting of a small eclectic group of people all perturbed by a growing anti-science sentiment. Eventually it evolved into its current form and the Year of Science 2009, but even more importantly it initiated new relationships and collaborations, most of which do not advertise any formal connection to COPUS, so it is kind of hard to see all that COPUS has and continues to accomplish. For instance, here at Berkeley, several of us got together to decide how our campus could use the concept of the YoS09 to promote the depth and breadth of science that takes place on our campus – as a result, the Science@Cal initiative was born. Now, each Cal Day, science units on campus coordinate their efforts; we are planning a science festival on campus as a satellite event to the USA Science and Engineering Festival on October 23rd; and each month those of us involved in education and outreach get together for a brown bag lunch to discuss projects, share ideas, and learn from one another.

Locally, COPUS and the YoS09 also initiated a thematic approach to local science cafes, events at the California Academy of Sciences, and home page highlights on the website of Lawrence Berkeley Lab. But perhaps most importantly, COPUS initiated the emergence of Bay Area Science, a loose network of more than 100 science organizations in the Bay Area, sharing a common website and event calendar, interacting informally, and now working together toward a 2011 Bay Area Science Festival.

This COPUS "underground movement" has taken place in many different regions of the US – all sparked by connecting people and ideas. For those of you who have read The Starfish and the Spider by Brafman and Beckstrom, COPUS definitely follows the starfish model – there is no Director or CEO – those who are the most active (and that can be any body) influence the directions that COPUS will take, always striving for finding effective ways to engage the public in the wonders of science. It amazes me to realize the number of people that I now interact with because of COPUS – from an ex cheerleader for the Philadelphia '76ers now known as the Science Cheerleader, to a vibrant mom of two in Florida, a bioengineer at MIT, a chemist in Northridge who teaches science to cops, and a scientist who uses "science zines" to focus on science concepts for art students in Chicago. They are all part of my extended COPUS family and help me to see new ways to communicate about science.

Some people instantly "get it" and jump on board, easily finding a way through which they can gain and/or contribute to the efforts of COPUS. For others, it is less obvious. But we were amazed and delighted when we received support in 2008 from two foundations – the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and The Whitman Institute – thanks to two individuals, who "got it:" Soo Venkatesan, now a project manager for the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, and John Esterle, the Executive Director of The Whitman Institute. They each facilitated an investment in COPUS, recognizing the potential of such a unique grassroots effort. We are very grateful to both Soo and John and in particular to The Whitman Institute (TWI) for this recent gift. There is an elegant match between what COPUS is trying to do and TWI, which is a private foundation located in San Francisco, dedicated to promoting ways for people to develop their capacity to think critically.

Tiago Quental

Congratulations to Tiago Quental and Charles Marshall whose paper, Diversity dynamics: molecular phylogenies need the fossil record, was designated as the featured article in the June 21, 2010 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

When asked to reflect on the importance of the fossil record in our understanding of today’s biodiversity, Tiago responded:

Biologists, typically overlook the fossil record when trying to explain how we got to our current biodiversity, in part because for many groups their fossil records are too poor, and in part due to the development of tools that were thought to give reliable estimates of speciation and extinction rates directly from molecular phylogenies. This has been especially attractive given the ease with which DNA sequence data can now be generated for living species.

However, the only way to directly access past biodiversity is through the fossil record. This TREE paper shows that extinction, speciation and diversification rates can only reliably be estimated with the fossil record. If we really want to understand both past and current biodiversity, we need to re-evaluate the use of DNA sequences and fully embrace the fossil record.

To learn more, Read the abstract or the full article in Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Volume 25, Issue 8, 434-441, 21 June 2010.

Pleistocene survivor, the deer mouse. Photo by Glenn and Martha Vargas © California Academy of Sciences

Popular images of Ice Age California tend to feature enormous, extinct mammals like mammoths and saber-toothed cats.  By contrast, new research published in Nature examines populations of small mammals that survived through the end of the Ice Age and how they were affected by the climate change.

The research team of Jessica Blois (formerly at Stanford, now at University of Wisconsin, Madison), Elizabeth Hadly (formerly of UCMP, now at Stanford) and Jenny McGuire (UCMP) studied fossilized woodrat nests collected from Samwell Cave in Northern California.  Woodrats carry scat and regurgitated pellets produced by carnivores back to their nests.  These collections are filled with undigested small mammal bones, making fossilized woodrat nests treasure troves for paleontologists.

Comparing fossil data to modern small mammal populations in the same region revealed a big decrease in diversity during a period of global warming at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch.  There was a decrease in both species richness (number of different species) and evenness (relative dominance of species within a community).  A few species disappeared from the area entirely.  Some species remain in the area but as a much smaller proportion of the overall small mammal community.  And the main species to increase in relative abundance was the deer mouse — an animal that can tolerate a wide variety of habitats and climates.

Research of historic periods of global warming improves our understanding of how modern, man-made global warming will affect life on Earth.  Read more about this research:

• Fast-breeding mice dominate a warming world at Nature News
• Loss of species after Ice Age seen as warning at SFGate
• "Weedy" mice dominate a warming world while other small mammals suffer at Discover

Join us at the UCMP for a fun-filled five days of evolutionary explorations with biologists and educators from the University of California. On August 2-6, UCMP and the National Center for Science Education will host a workshop for middle school, high school, and community college biology teachers and science educators. Scientists will discuss their research, covering topics like molecular evolution, developmental biology, and human evolution. Learn how you can integrate cutting-edge evolutionary research into your curriculum. For more information about the workshop, including registration information, click here.

Last year's Think Evolution workshop was a great success — check out some photos from the workshop, below.

This week, we've launched a new online special exhibit — Fossil eggshell: Fragments from the past. This is the best online source of information about fossil eggshell — you can't find this info anywhere else!  This special exhibit was created in collaboration with Laura E. Wilson, Karen Chin and Emily S. Bray, from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Frankie D. Jackson from Montana State University.

We can learn a lot from fossil eggshell. Using scanning electron microscopy, we can examine the details of the shell morphology and structure. This provides clues as to the identity of the egg-layer; different groups of animals have very different types of shells. Fossil eggshell can also tell us about the ecology and behavior of the egg-layers — and their babies.

This online special exhibit features a case study of the Willow Creek Anticline in the Two Medicine Formation, Montana, where paleontologist Jack Horner and colleagues found numerous dinosaur eggs and eggshell fragments. Read about the discovery of the fossils, and what Jack and his colleagues learned about the egg-layers — dinosaurs Maisasaura and Troodon — through their detailed analyses of the fossil eggshell.

Much of the material in the online exhibit comes from the Hirsch Eggshell Collection at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. The collection was donated by eggshell enthusiast Karl Hirsch who made significant contributions to the field of fossil eggshell research. Learn about his legacy in the special exhibit section Karl Hirsch and the Hirsch Eggshell Collection.

Mounting evidence suggests we may be on the cusp of a major extinction event. Last week, UCMP Faculty Curator Tony Barnosky talked about modern extinctions on Science Friday, a weekly science talk show on NPR. Tony was joined by Barry Sinervo, Professor at UC Santa Cruz, George Amato, of the Sackler Institute and the American Museum of Natural History, and Vance Vredenburg, Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University. In a lively conversation, Tony and the guests discussed many examples of animals and ecosystems currently affected by global warming. If you missed the program last week, you can listen to it here.

Tony is the author of Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming. To learn more about his work, check out the Barnosky Lab website.

On May 17, Tony Barnosky gave the 2010 Integrative Biology Commencement Address, which he titled Geography of Hope, a line he borrowed from Wallace Stegner. Tony discussed the biological and global issues that will challenge the Class of 2010 — and how these graduates represent his hope for the future. Read Tony's commencement address, Geography of Hope, here.

Tony was involved with a BBC radio broadcast (May 2012) about the possibility of our being in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.

Tim White. Photo: Discovery Communications, LLC.

Congratulations are due to Tim White, Director of the Human Evolution Research Center and Faculty Curator at the UCMP! Tim was selected by Time Magazine as one of The 100 Most Influential People in the World. Tim receives this recognition for his work on human evolution. This past fall, Tim and his colleagues published numerous papers on Ardipithecus ramidus, the oldest and most complete skeleton of a human ancestor. Congratulations, Tim!