Science Under the Stars
Sometimes, a community decides they want something, and they just find a way to make it happen.
PaleoCon
This is the 8th in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. When I was hired to be the director of the Western Science Center, the museum’s board expressed a desire to make the museum a major center for scientific research. For a
Horse forearm from Murrieta
An interesting bone turned up today in our preparations for our new exhibit that opens later this year. We have a small collection of fossils from the California Oaks part of Murrieta, near the 15 Freeway. Unfortunately the company that carried out the excavation didn't collect all the
A little leg bone from the Ice Age
In our upcoming exhibit on Ice Age fossils from Riverside County, one of the prominently featured localities is the Harveston subdivision in Temecula. This is a small but remarkably diverse collection that includes examples of animals that are relatively rare as fossils from the area. Many of the Harveston bones
Research or Education...Why not both?
This is the 7th in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. Scientists spend a lot of time writing. Besides writing grants or other proposals to try to convince someone to pay for research, we write reports or manuscripts describing the results of our
Making sense of a vertebra
As we prepare our new exhibit, we’re drawing on collections from Riverside County that have mostly been recovered by mitigation companies. These companies generally do a great job of documenting and identifying specimens, but there are outliers. Unfortunately we have acquired a number of specimens that weren’t prepared
Tiny teeth
As we prepare our new exhibit on Ice Age fossils from Riverside County, one of the things we chose as a focus was to highlight the diversity of these deposits. To that end we've specifically looked for fossils that represent a broad range of species. Over a year
Why Museums?
"Museum collections provide the record of past research, and the baseline for future research."
More Mall Fossils
A commonly found and easily identifed part of a mammal skeleton is the head of the femur. This is visible in the Pacific mastodon femur below, as the large knob at the upper right end of the bone: The femoral head is a large hemispherical mass that generally sits on
Fossils at the Mall
Later this year we're going to open a new permanent exhibit at Western Science Center featuring Ice Age fossils from Riverside County. While the largest single fossil collection at WSC is from Diamond Valley Lake, we are the fossil repository for the entire county and hold collections from
Half a vertebra
As I've mentioned in prior posts, many of the Western Science Center's fossils were discovered during construction projects. Often the first indication that a fossil is present is when a bulldozer or other piece of machinery cuts through a bone, at which point the mitigation paleontologists
A museum of volunteers
This is the 5th in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. The Western Science Center currently has 18 paid employees, the largest our staff has ever been. And yet, given our scope of research, our busy programming and field trip schedule, and our