Paleobotanizing at the University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley is just across the bay from San Francisco, and the University of California has a campus here. On a fog-free day you can see the Golden Gate bridge connecting San Francisco to Sausalito.

The most prominent feature of campus is the campanile. It's a recreation of the campanile of St Mark in Venice. When I worked at Berkeley I could see it from my office - it was the best office clock I've ever had!

The integrative biology department houses the University and Jepson Herbaria that greet visitors with living plant displays. In the foreground is a Dioon cycad and in the background ferns and a podocarp conifer.

Also in the biology department is the Museum of Paleontology, which is guarded by a T. rex!

Inside the museum I was shown some plant fossils collected by Dori Contreras in New Mexico. Dori is a PhD student, and she recently won the best student presentation award for her talk on a fossil redwood. Here she is putting together some pieces of a fossil palm frond.

Dori also showed me a possible cycad fossil that she collected. I put my USB stick in the image so you can see how large the fossil is.

The person in charge of the paleobotany collections is Museum Scientist Dr Diane Erwin. She is below, together with Vish (an undergrad who is helping Dori), and Dori. They are sorting through the fossils on the table, and the museum collections are stored behind them.

I also had the chance to catch up with some paleobotanist friends. There's me on the left, Cindy Looy is standing - she's a paleobotanist at UC Berkeley, and Selena Smith is on the right - she's a paleobotanist at the University of Michigan.

Selena was visiting Berkeley to use the synchrotron (it's like a CT scanning device but more detailed) to look at ginger plants. Here's an example of other work she's done using this technique.

We had dinner at Gather, which is my favorite restaurant in Berkeley. The food was beautiful and delicious!