UCMP students Marianne Brasil and Tesla Monson share their experiences on their research trip to South Africa.

Assistant Director Mark Goodwin and his project collaborators (see Feb. 1 blog post) made a surprising discovery while collecting microvertebrates, turtles, and fish.  Within a small area of exposure in the Late Jurassic Agula Shale in the Tigray Province, just south of Mekele, Ethiopia, were the first sauropod dinosaurs ever reported from Ethiopia! The team […]

In December 2015 UCMP faculty curator Tony Barnosky and Stanford paleoecologist Liz Hadly attended The United Nations Conference on Climate Change to premiere a movie opening in Paris. The movie, Demain, was inspired by the 21-authored study that produced a 2012 Nature paper on tipping points. The film opens with Tony and Liz summarizing global change […]

Research by Faculty Curator and Professor Tony Barnosky and the Anthropocene Working Group continues to support the strong need for designating a distinct geological epoch, the Anthropocene.

Assistant director Mark Goodwin is in Ethiopia for several weeks as part of a collaborative project with UCMP alums Greg Wilson (University of Washington) and Randall Irmis (Utah). Together with colleagues from the University of Oklahoma, Addis Ababa University, and Mekelle University in Ethiopia, the team is investigating non-marine Mesozoic ecosystems from the Northwestern Plateau, Ethiopia.

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.