The Fall 2015 issue of the Berkeley Science Review features an article by Sara ElShafie, a UCMP graduate student in the Padian Lab, on the McKittrick tar seep fossils that have been stored in the Campanile since the 1930s. The convergence of an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to the UCMP to clean and catalogue more the 12,000 specimens in the collection and the centennial celebration of the Campanile in 2015 shined a spotlight on these unique fossils.

Making North America, a 3-part NOVA series that originally aired on PBS in November 2015, is a richly illustrated journey through the geological history of the North American continent. UCMP Director of Education and Outreach Lisa White appears in episodes one (Origins) and three (Human) in segments shot in northern California.

Scientists have found an abrupt change about 6,000 years ago in how terrestrial plant and animal species coexisted, right about the time human populations were ballooning and agriculture was spreading around the world.

The UCMP partnership with Point Reyes National Seashore and the National Park Service continues to thrive and fossil discoveries made as a result of this partnership are highlighted in a previous post. Lillian Pearson, who works part-time with Museum Scientist Erica Clites cataloging specimens from the Point Reyes National Seashore, is the lead author on […]

Sharing the Collections at UCMP The new year’s calendar focuses on the collections and the unique specimens that can be found here. UCMP is a research museum, which means that access is limited to researchers, our students, and affiliates. The 2016 calendar allows us to bring the collections to our supporters and the general public. Grants from the National Science Foundation […]

On November 7 UCMP participated in the Bay Area Science Festival Discovery Day at AT&T Park. Discovery Day is the closing event of the annual Bay Area Science Festival – a science extravaganza offering a wide range of science and technology activities in a variety of venues over a two-week period. The UCMP joined other […]

UCMP volunteers Kathy Zoehfeld and Don Pecko recently discovered a type specimen from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History among the hundreds of thousands of fossils in the former USGS Menlo Park collection.

Research on the extinction of large mammals by members of the Barnosky Lab and their colleagues highlights how entire landscapes are affected when modern elephants and their extinct relatives, mastodons and mammoths, disappear.