“A Good Week for Business, and More”

 

I am pleased to announce that “Pacific Paleontology”, our new paleontological mitigation venture, has been chosen to receive a $5000.00 U.S. Small Business Administration Dream Fund Grant! The grant will be used to buy essential equipment that is needed to effectively preserve and archive fossil discoveries made at local construction sites here in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties! 

And on a related note, Pacific Paleontology received its first contract this week to monitor a small subdivision project right here in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz County! The site is literally right around the corner from our house and will be excavating down into the very same layer of rock that got me involved in paleontology all those decades ago as a boy roaming the hills around my home; the Santa Margarita Formation. This layer of unconsolidated sands and gravels is widespread throughout central and southern California and hosts an extremely rich and well-known Miocene (12-15mya) marine fauna. I am looking forward to pinning that first dollar bill in my prep lab very soon! 

And in other related news I have been invited to the Digitization Academy with iDigBio as the Paleontological Collections Advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. There is a big push today in natural history museums to make their collections available digitally on the web for the wider scientific community to access. My classmates come from institutions in a global community; Africa, South America, Europe, etc., who are making natural history collections available worldwide. So researchers from anywhere in the world who would like to study the fossils in our museum’s collections can login to see photos and other data on the specimens representing the evolutionary history of life in the Monterey Bay! It really is phenomenally exciting to be a part of helping to make that piece happen for our museum and our community.  Super exciting!

https://calosba.ca.gov/funding-grants-incentives/california-dream-fund-program/ 

https://research.nhm.org/ip/santa-margarita-formation/

https://www.idigbio.org/content/introduction-biodiversity-specimen-digitization-2

https://www.scottsvalley.org/

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