Later this year Western Science Center will be opening a new permanent exhibit (more on that in a future post). One of the highlighted specimens in this exhibit will be the skull of Harvey the Mammoth. Like many of WSC's specimens, Harvey was discovered during a construction project,
"Max", the holotype Pacific mastodon, got his name because of his size. Even before he was completely removed from the ground, it was clear that Max was one of the biggest mastodons ever found in California. And yet, we don't know exactly how big he was.
This year (2026) marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Western Science Center. To commemorate this event, each month I'll be doing one post that specifically related to some aspect of the museum's history. A lot of California politics and planning revolves around water.
Shortly before the holidays, our curator Andrew McDonald and I were looking through one of our collections cabinets for a particular specimen from Murrieta, California. In the process we stumbled across a fragment of another tooth, recently prepared by a volunteer but not yet catalogued. Even though it was incomplete,
Each December, Brett and I try to spend a few vacation days in the small California coastal town of Morro Bay. Morro Bay (the town) is named for Morro Bay (the bay), an estuary than runs parallel to the coast for about 6 km. Morro Bay is the only protected
In our current exhibit "Life in the Slow Lane" one of the displays features fossil snails recovered from Pleistocene sediments during the Diamond Valley Lake excavation. Of the roughly 100,000 fossils recovered from DVL, over 4,000 were snails. These were pretty much all very small freshwater
Much of this text was originally published on my old blog “Updates from the Paleontology Lab“ on February 22, 2008. Western Science Center is located in a semi-arid basin in Southern California, a short drive from the Colorado and Mojave Deserts. It seems an odd place to spend much time
As I mentioned last week, many of the Western Science Center's fossils are actually recovered by paleontology mitigation companies, thanks to California's robust protections for fossil resources. Most of these companies are highly skilled and professional and do a great job recovering the specimens and their
California is unusual among U.S. states in having relatively robust protections for fossil resources, even when they are not on public lands (most states have none at all). As part of the permitting process for real estate development, developers are supposed to provide for the collection and preservation of
Besides the proboscidean tooth I talked about last week, our recent excavation in the Miocene Cajon Valley Formation turned up other interesting remains. Because these sediments were deposited in a fast-flowing stream bed, we don't typically find skeletons. Most of the identifiable remains are isolated teeth, and most
Last Monday, several of our staff members visited a fossil locality on National Forest Service land in San Bernardino County that we've been excavating for a number of years under an NFS permit. The deposit exposes a conglomerate of the Cajon Valley Formation, which is middle Miocene in
Tonight is the Members' Opening Reception for Western Science Center's new exhibit, Life in the Slow Lane. This is one of the most ambitious exhibits we've ever built at WSC, including more than 400 specimens, multiple videos and interactives, and live animal displays. We chose