In honor of Halloween, we’re exploring the curious, the scary, and the strange all week during our series, Museum of the Macabre. And what’s scarier than a deep, dark cave? For the special Halloween Pop-Up, Gavin and Graham will explore the different ways that caves form. Learn more about caves in this month’s Rock Record blog post.
About the Series: Join the Geology Gents, Gavin and Graham, for monthly conversations about rocks live on Facebook. Each month we’ll explore a different geologic topic, from Santa Cruz formations to tips for being a more effective rockhound. Graham Edwards and Gavin Piccione are PhD candidates in geochronology with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
Submit your questions ahead of time by emailing events@santacruzmuseum.org and feel free to include pictures of rocks you’d like identified! Pro-tip: the better the picture, the better the ID.
Presented by the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History and the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
Learn what you need to know to dive into taxidermy as a hobby. Alex Krohn shares the basics of preserving animals, the laws surrounding the process in California, and an overview of necessary tools, before then diving into an example on an Acorn Woodpecker specimen.
Alex Krohn is the Assistant Director of the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz. While he is a reptile and amphibian specialist, he loves helping connect people with all aspects of nature, both in the museum and across the natural lands of Santa Cruz County.
Saturday, October 17 | 10 a.m. to noon Every third Saturday at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History
It’s time to get your hands dirty! We’re excited to relaunch Saturdays in the Soil, a monthly volunteer program in our native plant garden. Learn about local ecology, native plants, and sustainable gardening while coming together as a community (in a physically distanced manner!) to steward Tyrrell Park through the City’s Adopt-A-Park program.
The mountain ranges along our western edge of North America have a much different origin story than those of the east coast. We’ve explored the Sierra and the Santa Cruz Mountains in past pop-ups. This time around we’re comparing our relatively young ranges to the ancient origins of the Appalachians and beyond.
About the Series: Join the Geology Gents, Gavin and Graham, for monthly conversations about rocks live on Facebook. Each week we’ll explore a different geologic topic, from Santa Cruz formations to tips for being a more effective rockhound. Graham Edwards and Gavin Piccione are PhD candidates in geochronology with the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz.
Submit your questions ahead of time here or by email to events@santacruzmuseum.org and feel free to include pictures of rocks you’d like identified! Pro-tip: the better the picture, the better the ID.
Peer into the wonderful world of wunderkammers — otherwise known as curiosity cabinets. Often filling full rooms, these pre-modern museums favored the eccentric and the esoteric. We’ll explore how our museum’s history is rooted in the Victorian versions of the curious trend, as well as more contemporary takes on cabinets.
About the series: Zoom into the stories, secrets, and science of our collections during monthly webinars with Collections Manager Kathleen Aston. This live event is an extension of our monthly Collections Close-Up blog, with added insights and intrigue. Members are invited to participate in this program before it is made available to the general public as well as ask questions directly of Kathleen. Watch last month’s webinar on the fossils and fossil collectors of Santa Cruz.
Welcome to the Museum of the Macabre, a month of curious events, unsettling insights, and fall favorites.
Watch Program Recordings
Collections Close-Up: Curiosity Cabinets This Collections Close-Up program explores the Victorian origins of cabinets of curiosities, as well as their role in the Museum’s history and present.
The Basics of Taxidermy Learn what you need to know to dive into taxidermy as a hobby. Warning for the squeamish: Alex Krohn will demonstrate the process on an Acorn Woodpecker.
Rockin’ Pop-Up: Caves In honor of Halloween, we’re exploring the curious, the scary, and the strange all week during our series, Museum of the Macabre. And what’s scarier than a deep, dark cave? For this special Halloween Pop-Up, Gavin and Graham will explore the different ways that caves form.
Macabre Mushrooms with Christian Schwarz From bizarre appearances to odd sexual proclivities, and digestive modes that are downright appalling, explore the macabre side of mushrooms.
More to Explore
Halloween Bingo Whether you are looking for an alternative to trick-or-treating or you want to add a little scare to your Halloween stroll, this nature themed scavenger hunt will have you noticing the mysterious and the spooky all around you.
Nature Pumpkin Carving Templates We challenge you to create a jack-o’-lantern that puts a spotlight on the nature of Santa Cruz County. Use some of our provided templates or get creative to highlight the wonders of nature this Halloween season.
The Macabre Martini Part of our series On The Rocks, exploring science and nature through curated cocktails, this recipe will add a mysterious darkness to your halloween evening.
Macabre Music Every year we explore the macabre side of nature through an evening of creatures, curiosities, and cocktails. This year, we invite you to create your own macabre evening at home with the help of this selection of moody, macabre music.
Choose your own adventure this California Biodiversity Day! Explore the biodiversity around you through a series of activities for kids — from building tools to aid in your observations to scavenger hunts that showcase the variety of life in your neighborhood.
Observation Jar Activity | Make observations, explore the different ways we can group objects together, and create a jar full of our fun finds!
Make Your Own Museum | Museums might be closed but in this video you can learn to make your own natural history museum at home! Include a favorite exhibit from the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History as well as your own curations.
Build a Bug Net | Reuse materials from your home to create a tool to help you observe the secret world of insects more closely — a bug net!
Nature Bingo | Tune into the biodiversity around you by following completing our nature bingo.
Monterey Bay Algae Guide | Dip your toes into the world of algae with this illustrated guide to local species and foraging ethics. Available in Spanish.
Cultivating Nature Awareness | Build your sensory awareness skills through nature journaling, games, stories, and exercises in mindfulness.
Pollinator Matching Activity | Explore the diversity of plants and insects around us through this fun game. Available in Spanish.
Redwoods are the tallest trees on earth, with lifespans that reach into the thousands, but their range is relatively small. A combination of longitude, climate, and elevation limit where they grow to a few hundred coastal miles — including right here in Santa Cruz. Explore the many compelling physical attributes of these towering giants, how humans have impacted their limited range, and the role that fire plays in their ecological story during this interactive class.
About the series: Join fellow nature enthusiasts for monthly explorations of the biodiversity of Santa Cruz County. Each month, our Public Programs Manager Marisa Gomez will share the stories of a specific Santa Cruz habitat as we develop our skills as naturalists.
This series will feature a presentation as well as an interactive session and is in partnership with Santa Cruz Public Libraries. Come prepared to share and to learn alongside naturalists deep in their journey and just starting out.
Dig into the fossil record of Santa Cruz through the eyes of locals who find themselves captivated by these windows into the past and who made it their work to share this passion with others. One of these important contributors, Wayne Thompson, will share his history with the Museum and the unique potential that fossils have to engage students with science and the natural world, inspiring the next generation of environmental stewards.
About the series: Zoom into the stories, secrets, and science of our collections during monthly webinars with Collections Manager Kathleen Aston. This live event is an extension of our monthly Collections Close-Up blog, with added insights and intrigue. Members are invited to participate in this program before it is made available to the general public as well as ask questions directly of Kathleen. Watch last month’s webinar on preservation policies in Museum collections.
Fossils tell the changing story of life on earth over millennia – but they can also tell stories of more recent changes. For this month’s Collections Close-Up, we look at an ancient specimen and its deep timeline, as well as a more modern, local legacy of integrating paleontological adventures with educating young minds.
The above fragment of a leaf-imprinted shale is a small slice of the Monterey Formation, an olive-gray to light-gray layer of shale and mudstone that underlies swaths of the Santa Cruz area. This formation, rich in once-organic material, was formed during the Miocene. Defined as the period of time between 5.33 and 23.03 million years ago, the Miocene was a period of great change for earth’s ecosystems. The earth’s ecosystems became cooler and drier, and animals like horses began to look more like they do today. And while there is much to explore in the world of Miocene mammals, this period also saw the first emergence of kelp forests and grasslands.
As distant as it may seem, you can explore the way the Miocene shapes present day places such as the Monterey Formation mudstone of Ano Nuevo Point or the ancient ocean beds that are today’s unique Santa Cruz Sandhills. Exploring these landscapes is a great way to observe stories of ancient life. In some places it is also possible to collect elements of these stories, as long as you maintain a responsible collecting ethic: research and follow the local laws, and consider the specific concerns of paleontology ethics.
This month’s feature was given to the Museum in 1974, where it is preserved alongside several similar specimens collected by high school students, who were led in their own exploration of ancient local life by teacher William Miller. Bill, as he was also called, was an earth sciences instructor with an active local presence in organizations like the Museum Commission, the Boy Scouts, and the Gem and Mineral Society. His passion for promoting public understanding of science made him a common feature in the local papers in the 1970s, speaking about fossil whale finds and similar spectacular local fossils.
Miller’s former students have fond memories of his classes, including his classroom’s improvised paleontology lab and how it helped them wrap their head around the history of the earth. But he was also a big believer in teaching beyond the classroom. Miller organized frequent field trips across the Santa Cruz County landscape for his students to learn firsthand about geology, paleontology, and even litter.
Oftentimes it is the eye catching creatures, like the whales and sea cows of ancient Santa Cruz oceans that capture our attention more than the subtle beauty of a delicate leaf impression. Another educator who has long been involved with the museum can speak to that as well – Wayne Thompson is a local middle school teacher, and paleontologist who helped prepare our stunning mastodon skull for exhibit in the early 1980s. His interests in science were encouraged by his education, and in particular, his teacher Bill Miller. Today, Wayne carries forward this legacy of connecting kids to science through paleontology – brimming with contagious excitement, he’s always happy to help the Museum, and always looking for ways to get his students involved in his paleontology projects.
He’s particularly keen to explore how new tools, like virtual field trips and 3D scanning technologies, can get folks excited about fossils and other topics. Now that health precautions have moved many schools into virtual mode, the enthusiasm of teachers like Wayne for experiencing new tools is even more critical. To dig deeper into what we can learn from the Museum’s fossils, and to explore how one of our county’s teachers is meeting the challenges of virtual education in uncertain times, check out this month’s Collections Close-Up event.
