paleontology

a man and woman in white lab coats carry a pail filled with a vine in front of an inflatable designed to look like a mobile lab. VENOMventure is written on the side.

Campus & community

An escape room for families teaches fundamentals of evolution

Can you create an antivenom in time to stop a green plague from taking over the world? VENOMventure - aVENENOtura is a fun game for any family, thanks to UCMP.

dozens of silhouettes of animal jawbones, in black and other colors

Mind & body

A jaw-dropping conundrum: Why do mammals have a stiff lower jaw?

blue, red, yellow and purple drawing of the head and neck of a dome-headed dinosaur

Research

Did dome-headed dinosaurs sport bristly headgear?

black and white portrait of Valentine, with beard and glasses

Milestones

James Valentine, paleontologist who grappled with the origin of animal diversity, has died at 96

a dinosaur skeleton next to a circular staircase

Losing track of (geologic) time at the UC Museum of Paleontology

sketch of extinct aardwolf relative, with big ears

Was this hyena a distant ancestor of today’s termite-eating aardwolf?

three sticklebacks about 2 1/2 inches long

Stickleback fish provide genetic road map for rapid evolution

Photo of Jack Tseng peering through hole in skull of an adult T. rex

Young T. rexes had a powerful bite, even if only one-sixth that of their parents

fragments of 120,000-year-old ostrich eggshells

Discarded ostrich shells provide timeline for our African ancestors

How many T. rexes were there? Billions.

artistic rendering of extinct primate ancestor in trees

Our earliest primate ancestors rapidly spread after dinosaur extinction

William Clemens holding a dinosaur fossil

William Clemens, expert on fossil mammals, dies at 88

2 high school girls working with teaching tools

Teaching tools show climate change is just one aspect of a changing world

depiction of 50 million-year-old pelagornithid bird with ancient albatrosses and penguins

Antarctica yields oldest fossils of giant birds with 21-foot wingspans

Meet our new faculty: Jack Tseng, integrative biology and paleontology

In Earth’s largest extinction, land die-offs began long before ocean turnover

All paleontology