Thanks to support from the Joan and Bob Field Evolution Education Fund, UCMP’s Understanding Evolution project has a new module on the Origin of Life.  Inspired by Director Charles Marshall and Clifford Brunk’s 2021 examination of criteria for evaluating origin-of-life scenarios, the AP- and college-level tutorial provides an accessible introduction to this area of fascinating […]
Updated July 30, 2026 This summer, several new research papers from members of the UCMP Community hit the press:   Jack is back on the cover of Science. On July 30, 2026, Jack Tseng, UC Berkeley alum Leah Kahn, and team analyzed new fossil data of mammals in Mexico, suggesting that the geographic region acted […]
UCMP will be tabling on Cal Day, Saturday, April 18, 2026 from 10am-4pm on the North Lawn of the Valley of Life Sciences building. We’ll be displaying fossils and have information on student opportunities. Students can “Meet the T. rex” from 11:00 am – 3:00 pm in the atrium of VLSB, 1st floor, in front […]
Unlike T.rex’s arms (not their fault!), our educational programming has a long reach. However, dwindling funding is jeopardizing our ability to provide these amazing resources.
We ask for your support in bolstering the UCMP Education and Outreach Fund this Big Give.
Maintaining our educational programming
Your gift directly impacts our ability to maintain and develop innovative ways of making lea…
PaleoBios does!  Check out two new publications in our open-access journal PaleoBios, each of which documents new deep-water bivalves. Curator Emerita Carole Hickman describes five new taxa in a comprehensive study of protobranch bivalves from the Keasey Formation of coastal Oregon in volume 42(4). In volume 42(5), Charles Powell II and N. Scott Rugh describe […]
Narimane Chatar, current NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Jack Tseng’s lab, was awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship to begin December of this year. The MSCA Postdoc is a competitive award from the European Union and funds up to 3 years of research work. Narimane will spend two years of her fellowship working with […]
Come join us at UCMP! Apply now for our senior museum scientist position to oversee UCMP’s paleobotany collections and museum labs. UCMP houses the pre-eminent paleobotany collection on the West Coast. The collection is global in scope, but its greatest strengths are in the Cenozoic (with plenty of Paleogene) floras of California, Oregon, and Washington. […]
The University has made Cal Day a day for admitted students and their families. UCMP will be tabling on Cal Day, Saturday, April 19, 2025 from 10am-4pm in the STEM Bonanza Tent along with other members of the Berkeley Natural History Museums on the North Lawn of the Valley of Life Sciences building. We’ll be […]
Diane has been an invaluable member of the UC Museum of Paleontology community for the past thirty years, managing a world-class paleobotanical fossil collection and ensuring its longevity and accessibility for generations to come. And while Diane has many years of service at UC, in the past 3 years she has only ramped up her […]
The UCMP has long been dedicated to providing a diversity of innovative and engaging resources for STEM education, bridging the gap between ground-breaking scientific research and both formal and informal science education.
Outreach Programming
UCMP has a rich history of offering high quality educational web resources since the early days of the web. In 1995 we launched the UCMP home page, one of…
How do we perceive the world around us? In order to understand what surrounds us, we utilize all our senses to make informed decisions. Similarly, this can be applied to the fossil record, as studying the sensory biology of extinct animals can provide insight into the environment they were living in. My research is centered […]
