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Science Under the Stars
Sometimes, a community decides they want something, and they just find a way to make it happen.
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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
Science
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
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Why Museums?
"Museum collections provide the record of past research, and the baseline for future research."
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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
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Life in the Ancient Seas
Max’s Mobile Museum was designed from the outset to allow for rotating exhibits that could be changed out quickly. At last Saturday’s Inland Empire Science Festival we debuted our first new Mobile Museum exhibit since 2022, Life in the Ancient Seas. This exhibit was inspired by a temporary
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Max's Mobile Museum
This is the 4th in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. Western Science Center has an interesting challenge for a small museum. We are the only natural history museum in Riverside County, which is roughly the size of New Jersey and has more
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Pacific Incognitum - The Pacific Mastodon Story
This is the 3rd in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. It was supposed to just be an exhibit upgrade. Last month I talked about the discovery of Max the Mastodon, and how he became the iconic specimen for the Western Science Center.
Mastodon
The Discovery of Max
This is the 2nd in our monthly series of posts celebrating Western Science Center's 20th anniversary. By 1995 the multiyear Diamond Valley Lake construction project was well underway. Huge amounts of sediment had to be moved to both increase the reservoir's volume and to provide the
Paleontology
Harvey the Mammoth
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,
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That belongs in a museum!
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.
Geology
Dropstones in the tropics
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