My visit to the Regatta Facility

The UCMP houses one of the largest fossil collections associated with a university in the world, so it is no wonder that some of the fossils need to be stored off-campus at the UC Regatta facility, located nearby in Richmond. This large warehouse is home to multiple campus-wide museum collections, including a variety of enormous whale skulls, huge ichthyosaur skeletons, and cyclopean bones of mammoths and dinosaurs from the Museum of Paleontology.

The Regatta facility is also the current location of the fossils that have been recovered from the 4^th bore Caldecott Tunnel project, and so I recently paid a visit. From the somewhat daunting pile of boxes, I selected several big, heavy ones labeled “vertebrates” and “invertebrates,” as well as some lighter, flat containers labeled “plants,” to take back to the UCMP in Berkeley. And the next day, I went to work.

Left: a newly-opened box of fossils from the Caldecott Tunnel 4th bore; Right: my workspace in the UCMP fossil preparation lab

Removing the lid of the first box revealed a pile of small bundles enveloped in toilet paper and neatly packed away in labeled plastic bags. After unwrapping a few of these small packages, I began to get an idea of the variety of fossils and rock samples that come from the Caldecott Tunnel. Most of the fossils I’ve seen so far are small, ranging in size from a tiny tooth several millimeters long, to some about as large as a fist. Many are broken or incomplete. But though they may not be visually impressive, they are rich in history. Not only will these fossils elucidate what the environment and climate of the East Bay was like in the middle Miocene Epoch, 9-16 million years ago, but they also provide clues about what happened to these organisms after they died. It is interesting, for example, that most of the invertebrate fossils are natural molds or ‘impressions’ in pieces of rock, while the vertebrates are preserved mainly as pieces of bones and teeth. Did they live in different habitats? Did they die in different places? How were these fossils preserved? These questions remain to be answered, and we’ll have to wait until further evidence comes in as I unpack and examine more material!

The plant fossils, however, are another story. Their preservation is quite good, and there are many leaves that can be seen very clearly, complete with anatomical details, on small slabs of rock. They are also especially interesting because they are particularly good indicators of the ancient climate of the San Francisco Bay Area, and provide a comparison of current and past geographic ranges of particular species. Watch for more on the Caldecott Tunnel fossils in future blog posts!

UCMP paleontologist Mark Goodwin examines a foot bone of an ancient camel

A drawer full of unpacked Caldecott Tunnel fossils

UCMP,  in partnership with the Museum of the Earth, the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, has received a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences: The Tree Room: Teaching and learning about evolutionary relationships

This three-year project will result in a freely accessible online resource for science educators and ISI professionals – The Tree Room. Building on scientific expertise, the learning research, and current project partner efforts, this resource will clarify what evolutionary trees are, how to read and interpret them, how they are built, how they inform research, and their applications relevant to society.  The project will clarify common misconceptions about trees, identify best practices for using trees in exhibits, and provide lessons and tools for teaching about trees.

The Tree Room will become part of the already highly successful Understanding Evolution website and will target K-16 teachers and ISI professionals but will ultimately serve students and the broader public by helping members of the target audience communicate more effectively about evolutionary trees as important scientific tools.

This project will have national impact on three levels by:

• Increasing the number of K-16 teachers and informal science educators who are prepared to teach about trees and able to clarify student and visitor misconceptions.
• Increasing the capacity of museums to develop effective exhibit and program components that integrate evolutionary trees by providing access to learning research and best practices gained through case study analysis.
• Increasing public understanding of evolutionary trees.

Measurable outcomes of the project will include:

• Improvements in teachers’ understanding of evolutionary trees.
• Increases in teachers’ confidence in working with trees and associated scientific data, and improved skills in synthesizing and transforming that knowledge for the classroom.
• Improvements in teachers’ skill and capacity for communicating concepts associated with biological trees in the framework of local, state and national science education standards.
• Increases in teachers’ ability to explain tree depictions in the popular press or in textbooks that may otherwise result in student misconceptions.
• Increases in ISI professionals’ use of trees in new exhibit designs.
• Improved use of trees in ISI exhibits in ways that better reflect the results of the learning research and best practices as established through case studies of tree visualizations in other institutions.
• Increases in ISI professionals’ confidence in using tree visualizations in museum interpretive activities and in discussing existing tree diagrams with visitors.

Teachers better prepared to incorporate trees into instruction and ISI professionals with a deeper understanding of the role of trees in exhibits will lead to a more scientifically literate public—one that appreciates the central role that evolutionary relationships play in a modern understanding of biology.

About once a month, I drive from Berkeley to Walnut Creek to pick up specimens for my thesis (dead birds for a study of the evolution of development in Aves), which necessitates a pass through the Caldecott Tunnel. Each time, I heave a sigh and try to shore up my patience as traffic before the tunnels slows to a stop. However, this bane has recently metamorphosed into an object of great interest, for it has come to my attention that the construction here is also uncovering of one of Earth’s most alluring treasures: fossils!

The construction workers are burrowing through rocks that are 9 to 16 million years old. Here, the hills have yielded thousands of fossils of all types of organisms, from plants, to vertebrates and invertebrates, to microfossils (very tiny plants and animals). They, in turn, provide clues to the past flora, fauna, and paleoenvironment of the Bay Area. Who knew that such a wealth of fossils could be found so nearby?

This semester, I am fortunate enough to be a Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) in the UC Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), a position funded by the California State Department of Transportation (known locally as Caltrans) as a component of a new partnership with the UCMP. The plan, in short, is for Caltrans to deposit the fossils recovered from the 4th bore Caldecott Tunnel construction project in UCMP, and for UCMP to clean, catalogue, and curate them. For further details on the UCMP/Caltrans project, please see Mark Goodwin’s article. As the GSR for this project, it will be my job to prepare the fossils by cleaning the dirt off, gluing together what is broken, and properly curating them in the museum.

Scanning the Prep Lab from left to right. Click on the image to see an enlargement.

When I was a little girl with aspirations to become a scientist and study fossils, I was a volunteer paleontologist at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in southeastern California. It was here that I first discovered the appeal of fossil preparation, and the wonderful feeling of reward that comes after many hours of meticulous work. Thus, I am quite excited about the work that I will do over the next few months!

I’ve just completed a scrub-down and organization of the UCMP fossil preparation lab in anticipation of this work, and the boxes of fossils will be arriving soon! As I proceed, I will report on the exciting finds that come to light as each box is opened, and the tale these fossils recount about the paleontology and geology of the East Bay hills.

Jeff Benca is a welcome addition to the Department of Integrative Biology and UCMP’s highly active paleobotany group as a member of Cindy Looy’s lab.  However, Jeff also spends a lot of his time “up the hill” at the UC Botanical Garden, where he has been given space for his astonishing collection of lycopods that he brought with him from his days at the University of Washington. This ancient vascular plant group (along with rare carnivorous plants and orchids) actually caught his interest while he was still a high school student in Seattle, but since those days, he has not only found ways to cultivate the plants, but is conducting research on both modern and extinct members of the lineage. Jeff hopes to discover how members of the lycopod group survived and thrived through the End-Permian extinction, 252 million years ago.

Both his research focus and unabashed enthusiasm caught the attention of National Geographic’s Explorers Journal and UC Berkeley’s News Center.

Another in a series of blog posts relating to the museum's "cataloging the archives" project

The UCMP archives contain five large scrapbooks containing museum-related newspaper clippings dating from 1948 to 1989. The earliest clippings in the oldest scrapbook concern UCMP paleobotanist Ralph Chaney's 1948 trip to central China to see for himself, Metasequoia, a tree thought to have been extinct since the Miocene. The existence of this living fossil had just been publicized in a paper by Hu and Cheng¹. The San Francisco Chronicle made a big deal about Chaney's trip, sending one of their own writers along, who filed a series of reports.

Left: Metasequoia is a deciduous conifer and was leafless when Chaney first saw it in March of 1948. See an enlargement. Middle: Chaney photographing the tree pictured at left in 1948. See an enlargement. Right: Chaney took this photo on a later visit when the tree was in leaf. See an enlargement. All three of these images are from Chaney's lantern slide collection.

But it was a later clipping from the October 20, 1953 Daily Californian that caught my attention. It concerned an interesting relationship between Chaney and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Here's an excerpt:

"Chaney, on a routine trip to Tokyo and the Far East in 1949, personally presented the Emperor with five Dawn Redwood [Metasequoia] trees, which were planted on the grounds of his estate in Tokyo.

"Chaney had known the Emperor from past visits to Japan, and said yesterday he was inspired to make the gift when he heard that Hirohito was very interested in the tree.

"In 1949, when Chaney was in China, he procured five seedlings of the recently discovered tree and delivered them to the Emperor.

"Chaney received occasional news of the progress of the trees, and made a point of stopping to see them whenever he was in Japan. When Crown Prince Akihito visited the campus recently, he presented the professor with a progress report of the trees sent from Hirohito."

Then, while looking at digital photos of Chaney's lantern slide collection — volunteer photographer Dave Strauss has photographed Chaney's entire collection of lantern slides and glass negatives for the museum — I noticed one of a Japanese gentleman standing next to what looked like a Metasequoia sapling. Hmmm …. So I went online and studied a number of photographs of Hirohito. I am now convinced that the image is of the Emperor himself with one of Chaney's saplings!

Left: The article from The Daily Californian describing Chaney's gift to Emperor Hirohito. See an enlargement. Right: Emperor Hirohito with one of Chaney's Metasequoia seedlings. See an enlargement.

And then a clipping from the May 6, 1969, University of California Clip Sheet provided this progress report: "By now, the Japanese have planted 100,000 dawn redwoods, all descended from Chaney's seedlings."

You never know what cool story you're going to find in the archives!

See other blog posts in this series:

   • Cataloging the archives: Geology camp 100 years ago

   • Cataloging the archives: Unearthing a type

   • The Amber Files: Words from the University Explorer

   • The Amber Files

See newsletter articles about the archive cataloging project:

   • The Mellon Foundation CLIR grant

   • Cataloging the archives: Update I

   • Saluting our volunteers [primarily about our volunteers working on the cataloging project]

Or search UCMP's archival collections yourself!
 

¹Hu, H.H., and W.C. Cheng. 1948. On the new family Metasequoiaceae and on Metasequoia glyptostroboides, a living species of the genus Metasequoia found in Szechuan and Hupeh. Bulletin of the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology New Series 1(2):153-161.

UCMP is proud to announce the completion of its web exhibit on archosaurs — I guess you could call it a Diapsida exhibit but we've chosen to focus on the archosaur lineage.

Matt Wedel examines the skull of Tomistoma, the False Gharial. Photo by Vanessa Graff.

It's roots go back to the end of the spring semester, 2006. Former UCMP grad student John Hutchinson (Ph.D., 2001, now a Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics at the University of London's Royal Veterinary College) had updated a number of the museum's web pages on dinosaurs, and he was asked whom he'd recommend for writing new material on the archosaur lineage. John suggested that we approach grad student Matt Wedel in the Padian Lab, and that summer the research, reading, and writing began.

Matt sent the bulk of the content for the archosaurs exhibit to me in May of 2007, but that was also the year Matt earned his Ph.D. and got a new job. Between the job and family, it was tough finding time to work on the final bits of archosaurs.

Meanwhile, I tracked down images, formatted the text that I had for the web, and continued to check in with Matt periodically. In May of 2010 Matt sent me the final pieces of archosaurs, the most important being his text on modern crocodilians. For the next several months, I worked with Matt to resolve some issues surrounding the archosaur phylogeny and I continued to hunt down images. By November, the exhibit was finally ready … except navigating among the numerous pages within the exhibit was quite difficult, so we decided to postpone its launch until UCMP Webmaster, Josh Frankel, could implement a solution. With the navigation issue resolved, archosaurs is now up and ready for the public. It only took us about six years!

The museum appreciates not only Matt's expertise, but his dedication — he was determined to complete the archosaurs exhibit no matter how long it took. And now it's finally “done” … although as Matt will be the first to tell you, the perceived relationships between organisms — particularly extinct ones — are always in a state of flux (due to new evidence and interpretations). So maybe Matt isn't completely done with archosaurs after all ….

Matt Wedel is currently Assistant Professor of Anatomy at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California.

Tony Barnosky has received an NSF grant that will support a highly collaborative research program to test the synergistic effects of climate change and human population growth in magnifying extinction intensity.  South America offers a natural site to test these effects.  Barnosky and graduate students Emily Lindsey and Natalia Villavicencio hypothesize that if human impacts were significant in causing extinctions, then the last records for taxa should be found only after humans arrived on the continent, and that the geographic pattern of extinction should follow the sequence of human colonization and population increase in different regions. If climate alone drove extinction, taxa should disappear during the most pronounced climate changes, but not necessarily coincident with first human appearance and population increase. If synergy intensifies extinction, then extinction should accelerate dramatically when increased human population pressures and rapid climate change coincide.

The data from South America will provide an ideal way to examine the role of synergy in triggering extinction. For that reason, the project team proposes to:

• Provide radiocarbon dates needed to determine the chronology of extinction for a broad spectrum of South American megafauna
• Contribute to the international cooperation needed to analyze the extinction chronology
• Provide a web-accessible database of the Quaternary fauna of South America, similar to NEOMAP and NEOTOMA
• Use the information to better characterize the extent to which the looming threats of rapid climate change and growing human population can intensify extinction potentials
• Develop effective outreach programs and scientific strategies to help minimize future extinctions.

Twenty-two scientists including lead author Tony Barnosky urge us to understand the danger of global environmental tipping points in their review paper in the June 7 issue of Nature. They examine data from past global environmental changes, compare it to how humans are changing the planet today, and discuss what that could mean for our future. They conclude that if we continue at our current rates of environmental destruction and resource use there will be dramatic impacts on the quality of life for coming generations.

For more information on the paper, including a video interview with Barnosky and a summary of how this research ties to The Berkeley Initiative in Global Change Biology, read the full press release at the UC Berkeley News Center.

The UCMP websites continue to rack up recognition and serve users around the world. Here's a taste of the latest website news:

• Understanding Evolution has been recognized as a key teaching resource in a recent NAS publication, Thinking Evolutionarily: Evolution Education Across the Life Sciences: Summary of a Convocation that was organized by a committee under the aegis of the Board on Life Sciences of the National Research Council (NRC) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and held on October 25-26, 2011.
• Understanding Evolution also received recognition as “Best of the Web” by the Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News!  Read more here.
• Understanding Science continues to gain popularity and now has international recognition with translations underway in Polish by the Center for Citizenship Education in Warsaw and in Swedish by the Center for Biosciences and Nutrition in Stockholm.
• Of particular interest is the Arusha project spearheaded by UCMP Faculty Curator, Leslea Hlusko, in which 37 teachers in 18 schools participated in workshops  to talk through the scientific process, how they teach it in their classrooms, and also to translate the Understanding Science flowchart into Kiswahili.  Their goal is to make this Kiswahili version of the Understanding Science flowchart available to all schools in East Africa that may be interested in it.

The Arusha Project

The Understanding Science flowchart in Kiswahili

This month's Evo in the News on Understanding Evolution looks at the work of incoming UCMP faculty curator Seth Finnegan. Seth is the lead author on a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the end of the Ordovician marked a true mass extinction caused by habitat loss due to falling sea levels and cooling of the tropical oceans. The Evo in the News feature explains and discusses the significance of this research, and includes additional links, resources, and questions for use in classrooms.

Read Evo in the News: Lessons for today in ancient mass extinctions.