A new paper just came out in Nature Communications naming a new pygmy sperm whale from Peru. I’m proud to have played a small part on the international team of 11 scientists put together by lead author Aldo Benites-Palomino describing this fascinating whale. The Physeteroidea is a group
A few weeks ago Leya and Jessie, one of our volunteers, were going through boxes of poorly-documented material collected from Temecula Valley that eventually made their way to WSC, looking for potential specimens for our new exhibit. One of the specimens that turned up from a site in Murrieta
In my last post I discussed the small collection of Ice Age bones from the Woodside site in Temecula that are being considered for our new exhibit. It was pretty easy to determine what part of the skeleton each bone came from; one was a partial right pelvis, and the
Over the last year we've been working on our new permanent exhibit about Ice Age fossils from Riverside County, which we hope to open this year. We have finalized the localities that will be featured in the exhibit, and now we're in the final stages of
This is the 10th in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. Today (October 15, 2026) is the actual 20th anniversay of the opening of the Western Science Center, and yesterday was National Fossil Day in the United States. It seems like a good
In our upcoming exhibit on the Ice Age fossils of Riverside County, we're focusing on representation across different locations. That means that some of the fossils we'll be displaying might be small fragments, but they're the only evidence that a particular species was present
Sometimes, a community decides they want something, and they just find a way to make it happen.
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
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
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
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
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