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1995

December 1995
  • December 22: The kelps and other brown algae are finally getting the larger exhibit they deserve. This is probably the last new item for the year 1995; we'll be taking a break from our labors for the holidays, and will return next year with more new and exciting displays. Happy Holidays, everyone!
  • December 21: It's a Chromista Christmas at UCMP. We have begun a major revision of the chromist pages, especially the introductory page, the water molds, and the golden algae.
  • December 20: Holy Chiroptera! The bats have had their exhibit expanded, due to the incredible popularity it has received.
  • December 19: They're tiny; they're slimy; they're cool. Check out the Bryozoa, a group with some of the strangest-looking fossils around.
  • December 18: We're nearing completion of our exhibit on Protista, now that the ciliates are up.
  • December 15: Oops! We forgot to announce two new biographical pages in our exhibit on evolution: Erasmus Darwin and the Comte de Buffon.
  • December 14: The coccolithophorids and yellow-green algae complete our coverage of the Chromista. While we were at it, we added a page on chromist ecology.
  • December 13: Micromonadophyceae now have a page on our server; these are believed to be representative of the earliest common ancestors of the green algae and land plants.
  • December 12: The Cycads conclude our Jurassic theme of new exhibits; read about these plants that dominated much the land flora during the time of the dinosaurs.
  • December 11: Our glorious Dilophosaurus exhibit has finally been refurbished! A new page has been added, where you can see the actual bones of the UCMP's little darling, Dilophosaurus wetherilli.
  • December 8: He's not Flipper, in fact he's not even a mammal. The ichthyosaurs were a group of marine reptilians that thrived in the Jurassic.
  • December 7: Volume 2 of the glossary is now on line. If you find those geology terms difficult, it's not our fault!
  • December 6: The Jurassic is back! That middle portion of the Mesozoic now has an exhibit in our virtual museum. Read about the Age of Dinosaurs and Cycads.
  • December 5: Mama's little baby loves hornworts, hornworts; Gotta see those hornworts on the Web!
  • December 4: As a start on our new exhibit on the Jurassic, we present the Solnhofen limestone of Germany, the site where the stunningly preserved Archaeopteryx was found.
  • December 2: By popular request, we have created a HELP page which will eventually be made accessible from most pages on our server. For now, it can be reached from the blue Web Lift icon: just click on the phrase "Take Our Web Lift to": or from most other pages, we will have a "Help" button that you can click on. We will continue to add more features to the help page over the next month.
  • December 1: Run for your lives! The theropod dinosaurs are loose! Enjoy a discursive tour of these carnivorous dinosaurs, or follow the path of evolutionary history from the tetrapods through the diapsid reptiles and the archosaurs and revised dinosaur exhibit to the theropods. Interested in facts about dinosaurs? Try the Dinobuzz, a new section dealing with current views in paleontology concerning dinosaurs, with an emphasis on how science works. Keep an eye on these continually evolving new dinosaur exhibits! Who says dinosaurs are dead?
November 1995
  • November 30: New exhibits feature some of the lesser known protist groups: the Apicomplexa and the basal protist groups. Read about these and other Protista on our server.
  • November 28: Pages are now up on everybody's favorite insects, the Blattaria and the Orthoptera. We guarantee you'll never look at cockroaches and locusts in the same way again.
  • November 27: The Monocots are the first portion up in our new exhibit on flowering plants. Read about the orchids and grasses, or find out how monocots and dicots differ from one another.
  • November 26: The Zoology Volume of the glossary is now up and running. Find out about coeloms, lophophores, zooxanthellae, and other neat terms.
  • November 24: Take a look at the Ornithischian dinosaur pages, especially Heterodontosaurus, a dinosaur with cool teeth.
  • November 23: We have come full circle, and finally present pages on the masters of the land, on whose continued existence our Survival depends, and without which, life on land would fall into a state of decay. Yes, the PLANTS are finally represented on our server, and the Happiness Patrol will continue to expand these pages, continuing the enlightenment that is part of our mission to the unknown.
  • November 21: We have a new exhibit on the Cyanobacteria; read about Spirulina, and other members of this important group of prokaryotes. Also, new geological exhibits are up on the Tommotian Age of the Cambrian, and the Devonian. Read about the origin of terrestrial ecosystems!
  • November 11: Although a work in progress, we are ready to show a sneak peek of a new exhibit called Journey Into Phylogenetic Systematics. The exhibit highlights the ways that biologists study evolution.
October 1995
  • October 30: We have revamped and reorganized our Subway. The map has been organized by topics (something a real subway CAN'T do!), and we have pulled out lists for on-line phylogenetics and education resources.
  • October 29: We now have a WAIS interace for searching the catalogs of type specimens.
  • October 27: "Tracking the course of Evolution" — A weekend short course offered by the University of California, Berkeley Museum of Paleontology on the weekend of December 2nd and 3rd.
  • October 20: We have a new home page that you may have seen on the way in.
  • October 18: We have a new glossary of ecological terms on-line!
September 1995
  • September 19: Five old pages made new: The Web Lift to Taxa, The Web Lift Thru Time, The GuestBook, About the Server, and About the Museum.
  • September 16: UCMP's new Tyrannosaurus rex stands proudly before the entrance to the museum. We have created a special Tyrannosaurus Expo for the occasion. Learn how our T. rex was constructed or view some outstanding dinosaur artwork created by local schoolchildren. The Web Lift to Taxa and Geological Time Machine are back on-line in a new, revised form. Stop by and check 'em out.
  • September 12: We have updated our NCSA http demon from from 1.1 to 1.4.2! Hopefully, this will make our server more efficient, as well as enable us to create some really nifty scripts. Unfortunately our guest book script is broken for the time being. We're working to get them back up as fast as we can.
August 1995
  • August 22: Check out the newly reformatted and rewritten exhibit, Dinosaur Discoveries.
  • August 20: We have added pages on the amniote egg, the bats, the ceratopsian (horned) dinosaurs, and the hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs).
  • Ever wondered about that green, slimy stuff growing in ponds? As a prelude to the plants, we now present an exhibit on the "green algae", featuring the charophytes. Read about the alga commonly called pond scum, and the closest living relatives of the plants, Coleochaete.
  • August 18: We have started working on a new exhibit...JAWS, The Story of Sharks and their Relatives. Take a sneak peek if you dare. We have given the bacteria a face lift. So to speak. Pages on the systematics and ecology of the bacteria are now on-line.
  • August 14: At long last! The UCMP on-line glossary is up. We currently have three volumes linked in, covering phylogenetic, biochemical, and cellular terms. Many of the entries on these pages make links to other sites on the server with additional information, and some, such as the entry for DNA, have had new pages created to help you explore further. The entire glossary is accessible from the "Any Topic" box on the new Combination Web Lift, already on many pages. Additional volumes are already being written, and will be put up as they are completed.
  • August 7: We are trying out a new icon mapped to take you straight to the Web Lifts to taxa and geologic periods. The URLs for these popular features will NOT change, only the icon we use to call them. We will be inserting this feature on all our old pages over the next month or so, and will have a glossary linked in soon. Let us know what you think!
  • As if that weren't enough, we've expanded our page of links to on-line natural history collections. The fungi and algae now have their own listings, and there's also a sort of grab-bag of miscellaneous resources.
July 1995
  • July 25: The flatworms and brachiopods now have exhibits on our server. Take a peek at some of the new features we're trying.
  • July 23: We have made new versions of the And More and On-Line Catalogs page.
  • July 20: We have revamped the About The Museum page.
  • July 18: We now have a small Introduction to the Fungi on line. The exhibit will be expanded in the future.
  • July 17: The dinoflagellates are now up and running, as are the choanoflagellates. We have also created a page on photosynthetic pigments, which links together the various "algal" pages.
  • July 13: New pages have appeared on the life history of metazoans and morphology and life history of the chordates, filling some key gaps in our server's coverage. The metazoan fossil record and the slime molds have been updated.
  • July 12: Minor updates to the Cnidaria and insect systematics pages have been made. We are slowly but surely going over our exhibits and adding Netscape enhancements, which will also be used in some exhibits in preparation. We will try not to do anything that will ruin the pages for those not using Netscape; please e-mail us if you have difficulty with a particular page.
  • The Introduction to the Vertebrates has once again been revised, and is now actually accessible from the Chordata cladogram.
  • July 10: We now have an on-line calendar of upcoming events in the world of paleontology. Digs, tours, expeditions, courses, conferences, around the world or in your own backyard: they're all here. Find out more about what's happening in paleontology! We have also expanded the section on trilobite systematics just a bit.
  • July 5: The main list of other natural history collections on-line has been reformatted (although the old page is still available for those without Netscape 1.1). Also, the slime molds have received a small page, and a new addition has been made to the long-neglected exhibits on the history of evolutionary thought with a page on the great 17th-century scientist Robert Hooke.
  • July 3: We have updated our Museum Publications page, including information about PaleoBios, the Museum of Paleontology sponsored journal. Also, check out a table of foraminifera images.
June 1995
  • June 30: Our server briefly went down, but it's back up now. We apologize to anyone who couldn't reach us, or who was cut off. This didn't keep us from putting up our pages on the Cheliceramorpha, otherwise known as the horseshoe crabs, sea scorpions, spiders, ticks, mites, and so on.
  • June 24: After a long wait, the Chromista have been added to the Eukaryota page on the Tree of Life. Check out the diatoms and kelps in their new home. Also, while introducing the Chromista, we introduce Brian Speer, who will be helping with Web design of botanical groups.
  • June 22: We have added pages on the Asteroidea, or true starfish, and on the Rhodophyta, or red algae.
  • June 14: It's been entirely too long since we have added anything new to our server. That does not mean that we haven't been working on new stuff. We're in the process of updating some of our more popular exhibits such as Tyrannosaurus rex, Great White Sharks, etc. Allen Collins has been exploring the presentation capabilities using some of Netscape's enhancements on some of our not as popular, but still fantastic spots in our museum, such as the Sponges!
April 1995
  • April 26: Our machine was recently moved to its permanent home in the new Valley Life Sciences Building. Like all moves, things did not go quite as smoothly as we might have hoped. UCMP1 has been down since Friday evening while cabling problems were fixed. We are back up on a temporary IP node until all problems are resolved at which time we will have another IP address.
  • April 20: The ever-expanding list of on-line natural history collections now includes a brief list of on-line geological collections.
  • April 18: Spoon worms and innkeepers? You need to know.
  • April 17: Ever wonder about paleontology? Well, UCMP has come up with a list of Frequently Asked Questions concerning paleontology.
  • April 8: Allen Collins has created a new home page. He was tired of that old boxy thing.
  • April 2: Our list of on-line natural history collections has continued to expand by leaps and bounds.
March 1995
  • March 28: We are undergoing rennovations while we try to revamp some parts of the server. Please bear with us and let us know if anything is broken during this process. Take a look at some work in progress, a newly redone DINOSAUR introduction.
  • March 21: We were the Cool Site of the Day today! We are even that much cooler for changing our opening pages to be a little more "Netscapey".
  • March 20: We are constructing our new Tyrannosaurus rex!
  • March 15: We are pleased to present an expanded selection of organismal biological links in our Other Collections page. We now have four new categories, including microbial collections, invertebrate collections, herpetological collections (that's snakes, lizards, and amphibians), and finally a section of links to natural history libraries and images. Enjoy!
  • March 4: An Intrepid Exhibit Designer has contributed some new information on Arthropod groups, including those fabulously famous fossils, Trilobites, as well as the ubiquitous Uniramians.
  • March 3: As promised, we have gotten to the root of all things. Life on Earth can be separated into Three Domains that clearly share a common albeit ancient ancestry, the Archaea, the Bacteria, and the Eukarya. The Viruses are different sorts of biological entities that might be considered life.
February 1995
  • February 19: UCMP is dedicated to enhancing the public's knowledge of the fascinating world of paleontology, as evidenced by this server. One area of our server enumerates several of the other public outreach programs that UCMP administers. This area will certainly be growing in the future under the direction of UCMP Public Programs Director, Judy Scotchmoor. For the time being, we have PaloePals (as described below), the heart-warming story of a very special contribution to our "Own a piece of the Rex" Campaign, and an announcement of the public unveiling of our new Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton.
  • February 11: THE SUBWAY has been redone! Finally! It now includes a lot more information and has a nifty new look and feel. Although not fully done, check it out now.
  • February 3: The exhibits on sponges have received a face-lift. Stop in for a quick visit of these beautiful and elegantly simple creatures.
January 1995
  • January 28: We have just completed PaleoPals, an interactive question and answer service for those interested in any aspect of Paleontology. Contributions are housed in the Log of PaleoPals [gopher] for easy viewing.
  • January 17: Take a look at the new exhibit on the stratigraphic divisions of the Cambrian period. What's a "Tommotian Explosion" anyway?
  • January 16: Sea cucumbers, sea urchins, starfish and other spiny-skinned things, all known as the Echinodermata are introduced to you in another set of exhibits in the phylogeny section of our museum.
  • January 10: More work has been done on numerous pages on the server. Check out Three Domains Of Life, the slick new introduction to all the life on this world. Also check out a new Introduction to the Vertebrates.
  • January 9: For the first time in many months, we experienced a decline in usage. Perhaps the holidays contributed to this. We'll see what the future holds.
  • January 1: A recent issue of U.S. News and World Reports featured our UCMP home page in an article on the future of the Internet!

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