Blog Archives - Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History

Collections March 2019: Fern Fever

Open the delicate pages of this month’s close-up item and you’ll find ferns from long ago. Though carefully pressed and arranged, this pressed plant album doesn’t tell us which species are on display or where they were found. It does, however, offer some perspective into female participation in 19th century science— a relevant point during Women’s History Month — and how people from the Victorian era explored nature through these ancient plants.

Pressed plant album — Entitled “Sea Mosses,” this pressed plant album holds neither mosses nor anything from the sea. Its contents do, however, signify a path taken by some women who sought to engage the natural sciences.

A purpose-built seaweed collecting album, the engraved cover is entitled “Sea Moss,” though no moss or seaweed rest inside. Some pages feature single specimens. On others, a mixed array of leaves and branches almost leaps out at the viewer. In a time where traditional scrapbooking was a popular pastime, books like this were sold to support the collecting and pressing of seaweeds and other plants.

It is one of several albums once part of the James Frazier Lewis estate. Lewis was a son of Donner Party survivor Martha “Patty” Reed Lewis, who had settled in the Santa Cruz area. This collection was given to the Museum in 1945, with a note suggesting that the albums were made by Mr. Lewis’s daughters. We know very little of these possible authors, though, and Lewis’s obituary lists him as survived by a sister and a niece.

This recorded silence on the subject of women is unsurprising, although it is an absence that is being excavated more and more. And it is indeed likely that these albums were made by women. The Victorian era witnessed a widespread seaweed-collecting craze. Yet it was women, already the more prolific scrapbookers, who were the most prolific creators of these pressed albums.

Artistic arrangements of plants, whether fresh or pressed, from land or sea, were considered an appropriate and healthy hobby for young women at a time when their participation in the natural sciences was generally rebuffed. Whereas the men who made pressed plant albums could engage more formally in the emerging profession of botany, female collectors were encouraged to make sentimental and decorative displays.

Clipping on the life and growth of ferns — Found in Laura Hecox’s scrapbook, this clipping details and illustrates the natural history of ferns. Without the aid of flowers, ferns propagate via spores, which take the form of small dots on the underside of the plant’s leaves.

That does not mean they were not active in furthering the field, of course. Recent scholarship acknowledges the importance of the female contribution to botanical fields through non-professional botanical societies. Similar realities unfolded in other disciplines, such as the case of Laura Hecox. An avid naturalist without formal scientific training, Laura’s correspondence with scientists even resulted in two species being named after her: a fossil snail and a type of banana slug.

And how do we find ourselves with a sea moss album featuring ferns? Because pteridomania, or fern fever, also reverberated through Victorian culture. Fern-hunting parties were the rage, ferneries or fern gardens decked houses both large and small, fern motifs exploded across arts and crafts, and pressed ferns were gathered into albums.

This craze was made possible in large part by the invention of the Wardian case by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in 1829. An early version of the terrarium, these sealed glass cases let British folks bring a variety of exotic plants into their homes, including the ferns that naturally grew happier in the wetter and wilder parts of Britain.

Some also suggest the late 18th century discovery of fern reproduction via spores promoted specific interest by allowing collectors to propagate them at home, in addition to collecting. In one of her scrapbooks, Laura Hecox saved a beautiful article on ferns some time in the late 1890s.

Fern festival at the museum in 1980 — Ferns hang from the Museum’s ceiling and branch out from displays at the Museum’s 1980 Fern Festival.

And lest you think pteridomania has disappeared — the American Fern Society, founded in 1893, is still kicking. They promote the cultivation and study of ferns, and have a solid introduction to ferns on their website. Our very own Museum even hosted a Fern Festival in March, 1980. A collaboration between the Natural Science Guild of the Santa Cruz Museum Association and the local Native Plants Society chapter, this three-day event “celebrate[d] the variety and beauty to be found in ferns.”

Stop by the Museum this month to take a closer look at some fabulous pressed ferns. Botanically speaking, March at the Museum also includes a native plants garden design workshop on the 7th, as well as our twice monthly Saturdays in the Soil volunteer gardening program.

Collections February 2019: A Puzzle from the Pleistocene

In January, we looked at rocks from our oldest collection. Today, we explore the Museum’s newest fossil: a fragment of a locally-discovered tooth that belonged to a Columbian mammoth. Not only is this an exciting specimen for the Museum’s Collections, it also brings into the public sphere another piece of what local paleontology expert Frank Perry describes as the “giant jigsaw puzzle” of paleontology.

The tooth is about the size of a half-gallon of milk. On its crown you can see ridges that would, some hundreds of thousands of years ago, grind grasses and sedges much like cattle do today. Mammuthus columbi was primarily a grassland grazer. These grinding teeth grew in sets of four, and were replaced several times throughout the animal’s life, just like in elephants. Its enamel plates are slightly tilted, which helped to keep the teeth sharp as they wore down.

The Columbian mammoth was one of several mammoth species that lived during the Pleistocene, about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. It would have appeared in North America about one million years ago, where its range stretched from Canada down to Nicaragua and Honduras. In contrast to the thick coat of its relative the woolly mammoth, the Columbian mammoth probably did not have much hair.

Fossilized mastodon tooth — Notice the more pronounced cusps of this fossilized tooth from a mastodon, a distant cousin of the mammoth. This difference helped mastodons to feed on woodier plan material, like trees and shrubs.

They stood up to 14 feet high at the shoulder and 13 to 15 feet long, with tusks up to 16 feet long. These animals may have weighed between 18,000 and 22,000 pounds, just under the weight of a school bus. Compare a tooth from a mastodon’s skull to this mammoth, and you’d notice higher cusps: an indicator that mastodons ate woodier shrubs and trees.

Our newest tooth was given to the Museum by longtime friend Frank Perry. In a recent email titled “Mammoth Puzzle,” Frank wrote to say he received a piece of tooth that was collected several decades ago at an excavation in Watsonville, and could it be the missing part of a similar tooth from the same area, already in the Museum Collections?

Here he was referring to the 1973 discovery of a Columbian mammoth tusk, a whole tooth (weighing a whopping 10 pounds!), and a smaller tooth fragment. With great excitement, we scheduled an appointment to compare the two partial teeth to see if we indeed had a match.

Fortunately for us, Frank Perry loves to share. He sat down with us to offer some of his personal history studying Santa Cruz County’s fossils, and that includes several mammoth finds over his career. Often these discoveries have been teeth, which are so huge and durable that they often outlast the rest of the animal’s body.

It’s fairly common, Frank says, for these discoveries to happen at construction sites or coastal cliffs, or any place where ancient sediments get exposed. And while our two teeth were not a match, we weren’t wrong to hope: Frank points out that in the history of paleontology, after someone finds a fragment, it sometimes takes “50 or 100 years before a fossil is found that shows what the rest of the animal looked like.” Paleontologist Charles Repenning, for example, found the remaining parts of a fossil pinniped — a relative of modern sea lions — more than half a century after the original fragment was discovered.

Part of the reason these mammoth teeth are so cool is because most fossils found in Santa Cruz are marine. Many people have found seashells, whale fossils and pinniped parts. However, they’re also interesting because they represent the contemporary set of large animals, or megafauna, that lived during the Pleistocene.

Mammoths and mastodons weren’t the only megafauna to stomp the landscape — camels, giant ground sloths and saber-tooth cats also roamed North America. To learn more about the Pleistocene Epoch and its animals, check out the University of California Museum of Paleontology. For those who still wonder how the Museum’s new tooth — and paleontology in general — might matter to their lives, Frank makes an excellent case for the joys of exploring the deep past.

“Everyone is curious about their own genealogy,” he says. “Paleontology is nature’s genealogy.” Whether learning how changing climates have shaped our lands or tracing evolutionary relationships between extinct species, paleontology can tell us more about how we came to be. And one way to fill in the gaps of our past, Frank says, is careful observation.

“In paleontology,” Frank says, “you often hear the statement, ‘the present is the key to the past.’ By looking at modern day plants, animals and geologic processes, we can better understand the past. But observation is also a key to the past. Learning to see these things — that takes practice.”

Rebecca Hernandez: Board Member

Meet Rebecca Hernandez: artist, scholar, educator, and newest member of our Board of Directors. Rebecca has served as Director of the UCSC American Indian Resource Center since 2014, and brings a wealth of experience in having guided and worked with museums and universities throughout her career. We’re delighted to have her join our team!

A nascent admirer of the natural world, Rebecca was not always a fan of trekking around the outdoors. She grew up in Los Angeles, an asthmatic child hesitantly playing in a schoolyard set beside a traffic-clogged freeway. “I associated being outdoors with being uncomfortable, nervous and worried,” she says.

But, after succumbing to the charms of California landscapes and pushing herself to explore the natural world, she’s now an avid walker and budding naturalist. Whether hiking the trails in the Fort Ord Natural Reserve or simply walking near her home, she loves to watch seasonal changes in flora and fauna, and now seeks to help others find the same joys.

“I think it’s similar for a lot of folks,” she says, “where the outdoors isn’t associated with recreation. It’s either associated with hard work or danger. I want to help people see that there’s so much more.”

After earning a B.F.A. in painting from the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico, she pursued her M.F.A. in exhibition design and museum studies at California State University Fullerton, followed by her M.A. in American Indian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. In the past, she has helped guide the Museum’s educational efforts in sharing Native American history.

“Often, when we talk about American Indians,” she says, “it tends to be about loss, difficulties, struggle, and the realities of what occurred. But it’s also important to talk about the contributions, the joy, survivance, and the fact that we’re still here and contributing in important ways.”

Steve Davenport: Board Member

Meet Steve, a member of our Board of Directors and a regular at the Museum since the ‘80s. From keeping his finger on the pulse of our building’s structural wellbeing to ensuring our programs’ financial support, Steve has played a crucial role in the Museum’s trajectory for many years.

Steve first came across the Museum when he and his wife Julia helped set up the California Native Plant Society’s Spring Wildflower Show when it was held here. He’s been involved in several of Santa Cruz’s scientific institutions, having worked his way from sample-collecting field technician to Managing Director at UCSC’s Long Marine Laboratory over a 39-year career there.

Ask him which of our County’s native wildlife he enjoys most and he’s hard-pressed to choose just one. A longtime enthusiast of the natural world, Steve has been inspired by natural history since he first learned to sail on lakes as a boy and, years later, on open ocean voyages.

It was on one such trip he was first inspired to engage the natural world in a deeper way. While sailing home from Hawaii, he was struck by the expansiveness and wonder of the Pacific, and determined to study ocean and Earth sciences when he arrived back on California shores. Since then, he has enjoyed a diverse career in marine operations and research organizations, including the U.S. Geological Survey Branch of Marine Geology, the UCSC Institute of Marine Sciences and others.

“I think it’s important to instill in everyone, especially youth, an appreciation — and hopefully a love — for the natural world,” he says.

Whether you’re noticing the broad shape of our coastal mountains or which bird species frequent your backyard, Steve is a fan of deliberately familiarizing oneself with the natural world, one phenomenon at a time.

“If I could make a pitch it would be that people pick one natural thing to observe, then go learn more about it and figure out why it’s there. Doing that, I think, makes life richer, and perhaps makes us more likely to know, appreciate and protect our environment.”

Collections January 2019: Laura Hecox’s Rocks

January brings a new year and new opportunities for contemplation. Many take this occasion to make resolutions, though the new year is also an opportunity to reflect on the past. This month, we look to the Museum’s past to celebrate the 165th anniversary of the birth of our founding naturalist, Laura Hecox. And for this month’s Close-Up, we examine Laura’s geology specimens, their history, and how they enhance her legacy.

The three specimens include:

Stibnite sample — A smooth, gray mineral, this stibnite is composed of the elements sulfur and antimony.

[Stibnite, from Nevada], Sb2S3. An ore of antimony, stibnite often occurs in the form of long, prismatic crystals. Humans have long been aware of stibnite: it’s one of several cosmetics used by ancient Egyptians to adorn the eyes. Today, you can find it in fireworks, batteries and metal bearings. People have even found stibnite in the nearby New Almaden Mine!

[Cinnabar, from Napa], HgS. Cinnabar is a toxic ore of Mercury. Although it can be found in crystal form, it usually takes the shape of a big hunk of beautiful, red cinnabar. In the past, people often sought cinnabar for its mercury (drops of liquid mercury are sometimes bound within its crystals), which was once used to separate gold from ores and stream sediments.

Cinnabar sample — Red and rough to the touch, cinnabar is a sulfide mineral that sometimes holds liquid mercury.

Due to its characteristic bright red color, it was often used for decorative or artistic purposes; the pigments known as “vermillion” and “Chinese Red” were made of cinnabar. But it’s as poisonous as it is beautiful. Prolonged exposure to cinnabar may inflict skin rashes, and even damage to the kidneys and nervous system.

[Quartz, unknown location], SiO2. Quartz is one of the most abundant minerals found on Earth’s surface. Though generally clear and colorless, small impurities can create prized colorful specimens like amethyst. From gemstones to stone tools and glass-making, quartz has an incredible variety of uses.

Quartz sample — There are many varieties of quartz, from purple amethyst to colorless rock crystal, but they all stem from uniting silicon and oxygen atoms.

Recently, as part of the work of our Collections intern Isabelle West, these specimens were rediscovered in our geology cabinets and relocated to the dedicated Hecox Collection cabinet.

Laura Hecox was born in 1854 to Santa Cruz lighthouse keeper Adna Hecox. She was an avid collector, even in childhood. Her father built cabinets to house the rocks, shells, fossils, and artifacts she gathered from the natural world surrounding the lighthouse. She eventually became keeper and showcased these materials in a small museum during the lighthouse’s public hours, which grew quite popular.

In 1904, she gifted much of her diverse collection to the City of Santa Cruz, founding what is now our Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. Her collection was sorted into the various components of the Collections: her shells became a part of our malacology department, her egg specimens, our oology department, and her rocks the foundation of our geology department.

But we now recognize that, when together, Laura’s specimens carry more meaning than the natural histories they represent individually. Reunited in one Laura Hecox Collection, they embody the unique story of a woman in science — an insatiably curious observer — who showed by example that anyone can be a naturalist.

These specimens mark a point of progress in our work to preserve and promote Laura’s legacy. As we think about her story, set against the backdrop of a Victorian-era boom in collecting natural history specimens, we might wonder what Laura would think of modern rock-collecting.

While we are big fans of hands-on learning, we have to stress the importance of researching the legality of collecting geologic specimens. Aspiring rockhounds, be sure to ask yourself: how much should I take? Who owns the land I’m on? What restrictions are in place and why?

Whether you’re hunting for fossils, rocks or petrified wood, regulations vary. Check websites for local beaches, parks, and natural spaces. For a great overview of rock-hounding and related laws, check out the comprehensive site Gator Girl Rocks.

Finally, these specimens prompt us to think about the different levels of the past: these rocks were collected over 100 years ago, which certainly feels like a long time. Yet they belong to a different scale where 100 years is more like the blink of eye — perhaps even less.

Gypsum crystals from the Cave of Crystals in Naica, Mexico, grow at a nearly imperceptible rate of 14 femtometers per second. That means those crystals would take over 3,400 years to reach the width of a penny. Though difficult to grasp at this scale, understanding deep time is important for understanding our natural world.

In their engaging review of public understandings of deep time, the British Natural History Museum notes that navigating deep time is enhanced by the use of meaningful, contextualized events like birthdates. To better situate 2019 within your personal timeline this January, come check out Laura Hecox’s rocks or join us for her birthday beach cleanup!

Penny Rich: Museum Supporter

Meet Penny Rich, one of our ardent supporters and a regular at our many special events. You may have met Penny at one of our exhibit openings, or even down in the garden with clippers-in-hand at a Saturday in the Soil.

Penny is a familiar face in the Seabright neighborhood, having moved to Santa Cruz over 20 years ago. Her outdoors-loving family enjoys a long tradition of supporting community-focused libraries, open spaces and museums.

“It’s so nice to have the Museum in our neighborhood,” she says. “It’s unique, it’s intimate, I like the wildlife, and I like the new and different exhibits!”

Her granddaughters first brought her to the Museum, where they often visited the sea stars and other marine creatures in our intertidal touch pool. “I even have a picture of all seven of them on the whale!”

Penny is an educator. For two decades she taught students at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, both the history and culture of Latin America, from Mexico and Central America to Peru.

Her interests brought her to Mayan and Incan ruins in a historical trip through Latin America, where she met her husband. She continued teaching once back in Santa Cruz, where she taught English as a second language for 12 years, and eventually claimed the helm at her family’s flexible packaging business in southern San Francisco.

As a teacher, Penny enjoys seeing the Museum’s education team bring science education to Santa Cruz’s students through its robust programs.

“I really admire them,” she says. “They’re enthusiastic, they make it interesting and they really keep the kids engaged!”

Collections December 2018: Wildflowers in Winter

Beautiful naturalist's folio — Folio cover: The front of this folio is adorned with redwood branches and needles, marking an invitation to savor Santa Cruz’s natural beauty before readers even reach the first page.

Often in the coldest months we express our warmest feelings. When remembering old friends fondly you might send an email or post a throwback photo — in the 1890s you might have dedicated a book of poems. December’s Close-Up is “From California,” a beautiful folio of poems and paintings whose cover has graced our social media pages before. This month we dive deeper!

The dedication at the front of the folio announces: “To my lifelong friend, Smith Griffith, these verses are affectionately dedicated. Bart Burke Santa Cruz, Calif. Dec 20, 1890.” The author, Bartemus Burke, was born in Richmond, Indiana, and served as Santa Cruz Postmaster from 1887 to 1890. His poems, penned in fine calligraphy, speak of the joys of the Santa Cruz landscape, the delights of encountering nature and the return of wildflower season.

A page illustrated by the bursting reds of blooming thistles, for example, reads, “Clad are we in armor gray/Till the merry month of May/Then our scarlet plumes and gay/Don we for a holiday.” We have fewer details about Burke’s lifelong friend, Griffith. We do have a local news report, unearthed by Geoffrey Dunn in his research for Santa Cruz is in the Heart Volume II, declaring that Griffith would “not receive a souvenir of lovelier conception and design than th[is] one from Santa Cruz.”

Folio page on red thistles — A page from our folio where Bartemus Burke’s poetic words describe red thistles, painted by artist Lillian Howard: Because many native thistles flower just once before dying, they tend to produce many flowerheads (and abundant nectar) to attract pollinators, generating quite a colorful display. It’s easy to see why the author chose to highlight them!

The loveliness of this work comes not from the poems alone but from the breathtaking landscape and wildflower oil paintings that illustrate them, created by the gifted Santa Cruz artist Lillian Augusta Howard. Howard was born in 1856 and came to Santa Cruz in the early 1880s. She taught art, botany and English at Santa Cruz High, where she would later become Vice Principal.

Enchanted by the natural world, she took enrichment classes, learning how to teach students about marine plants and animals. She worked across a few mediums, including pen and ink drawings and photography. But she is best known as a watercolorist of wildflowers and landscapes.

In the late 1800s, Howard and others were fueling interest in elevating the California poppy, Eschscholzia californica, to something more than the unofficial state poppy. After holding an evening session on “Floral Culture, Wild Flowers and Ornamental Plants” at the 14th annual California State Fruit Growers’ Convention in Santa Cruz, November 1890, the flower-enamored educator opened a discussion on the proposal of a state flower.

Folio dedication page — The dedication page, where Burke speaks of his lifelong friendship to Smith Griffith, the folio’s original recipient: We know little about Griffith, but we do know the artist behind its illustrations, Lillian Howard, helped spark recognition for California’s diverse wildflowers.

To enhance the conversation, she showed paintings of several contenders, including the California poppy. A lively dialogue ensued, and was concluded by an impromptu vote. The California poppy won the lion’s share of votes. Formal legislature made it official in 1903.

As we wait for wildflowers to return, perhaps even the arrival California Poppy Day on April 6th, we might enjoy making a memento for a friend or loved one. If you have any special someones who would enjoy a personalized gift card or handmade nature craft, swing by our upcoming Winter Open House this weekend, Dec. 1 – 2, and dive into the holiday activities. Whether through art or exploration, with personal sentiment or historical significance, may we all enjoy the natural wonders of Santa Cruz this December!

Collections November 2018: Milling with a Metate

For the past few months, we’ve been very excited to partner with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band in presenting a series of talks, walks and workshops that highlight the past and present of the Native Peoples of California’s central coast. One of our exhibit halls, the Ohlone room, is permanently dedicated to exhibiting artifacts that offer insight into this part of history.

These include several large mortars and pestles which were used to pulverize or smash natural materials. They were especially useful in processing larger food substances, like acorns. November’s Close-Up expands this picture by showing another type of stone tool that hasn’t been on regular display: a metate, or milling stone.

The word “metate” is from the borrowing of the original Nahautl word, “metatl.” Metates are used with a mano, or handstone, to apply pressure to the materials that one is milling or grinding. When we think of metates, we typically think of the traditional Mexican, footed metate still widely used today to grind corn for masa.

In the Museum’s Hecox collection, we have a typical example (pictured below) of this style that was collected in the 1880s. Both metates and manos, and mortars and pestles, are types of querns: the broad term for a hand mill used for grinding materials.

Metate slab — Metate, Hecox Collection, collected 1880s

Metates often take the form of rectangular slabs with a single shallow depression on one side, across which a mano was pushed in a back and forth motion. However, these traits varied across Native Californian tribes.

Due to their shape, metates can be hard to distinguish from natural rocks. Indeed, the nature of a rock was a big factor in whether to use a stone as a tool (softer stones make it easier to mold an impression, for example). The first metate depicted in this month’s Close-Up is from the Soquel area, and you can see that is has a flat work surface across the top.

Metates used by the Ohlone were sometimes used on both sides, and often with the lesser-used, circular motion of grinding. While metates were often used for milling smaller seeds, they could also be used to process other plant materials and even meat from small animals.

To continue exploring the world of metates and milling, check out this review: “An Ethnographic Review of Grinding, Pounding, Pulverizing, and Smoothing with Stones.”

Collections October 2018: Soft-bodied and Suspended

Our halls are filled by a menagerie of creatures, and this month we add to their number by taking a closer look at this small, taxidermied octopus. Most of the preserved creatures we have on exhibit are terrestrial animals like coyotes or birds. But not all animals are furry or feathered, of course. Some, like this octopus, are soft-bodied, requiring an entirely different taxidermy process.

Given to the Museum in 1973, this octopus — species unknown — both adds to our depiction of marine life and represents an important distinction in taxidermy technique: rather than skinned and sculpted, it was freeze-dried by local taxidermy expert Richard Gurnee of Richard J. Gurnee Freeze Dri in Watsonville.

Taxidermy is an old skill, and the technique of freeze-drying is a relatively young innovation in its field. Some folks trace the history of taxidermy to the ancient Egyptian practice of preserving humans and animals through mummification. However, the word “taxidermy” is composed of the Greek words “taxis,” meaning arrangement, and “dermis,” meaning skin, establishing taxidermy as the art of arranging skin rather than an umbrella term for preservation techniques like mummification.

The word was coined in 1803 by Louis Dufresne, ornithologist and taxidermist for the French National Museum of Natural History. Early taxidermy was especially focused on removing and preserving a creature’s skin, then stretching the flesh over a frame designed to resemble the animal’s body.

But many of these early frames were far from perfect. Crude wooden or metal frames often misrepresented an animal’s actual figure. In one classic example, the body shape of the dodo was widely misinterpreted for a number of years due, in part, to a poorly constructed taxidermy frame. In the 1950s and 1960s, it became industry standard to use molded plastic models or forms that more realistically captured body shape.

Enter freeze-drying, where an entire animal is preserved through freezing and dehydration, almost eliminating the need for a frame. In this method, which greatly minimizes the need for artificial materials, a taxidermist inserts wires to bend and pose the body. They then freeze the specimen and review its position before drying.

Once everything is properly posed, the creature is placed in a vacuum chamber under sub-freezing temperatures, which removes tissue-bound ice. This can take roughly three weeks for something small, like a quail, and three months for something larger, like a coyote.

Then come the final touches: artificial eyes are used, as with any taxidermy, and some painting. While fur and feathers do not fade during the freezing process, skin and scales may require some paint to restore life-like coloration. Taxidermists use this method for more than wildlife — it can also preserve plants and fungi.

Refrigeration advances in the early 1990s mean that, today, freeze-drying is commonplace. More than an advancement in taxidermy technique, our octopus also represents a significant person in the industry’s history: Watsonville resident and nature enthusiast Richard Gurnee, who completed his first taxidermy project in 1954 as a child in pursuit of a Boy Scout Merit Badge.

He later studied zoology at Humboldt State University, and went on to work in a taxidermy shop while pursuing his master’s degree at UC Berkeley. Gurnee began to experiment with freeze-drying whole animals, having been inspired by scientists using the same technique to preserve tissue samples.

While he was not alone in this insight, his pioneering work brought him to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where he served as a taxidermist for several years. Fortunately for us, he returned home to Watsonville in the 1960s to start his own taxidermy business.

Gurnee has taxidermied specimens for museums across the country, including our collection here in Santa Cruz. When you stop in to see this month’s Close-Up, be sure to check out our other cases, as many of them feature Gurnee’s handiwork. And if you find yourself in the mood for talking taxidermy, be sure to visit us for the Museum of the Macabre later this month, where you can witness the taxidermy process firsthand!

Chris Soriano: Field Programs Coordinator

Chris is a born educator. Even at 12 years old, you could find him teaching others about interpreting nature with a hawk perched upon his arm. His career in outdoor education began roughly there, at the Last Chance Forever Bird of Prey Conservancy in San Antonio, Texas, where he volunteered alongside his family. His knack for outdoor education carried him to the San Antonio Zoo soon after, where he helped with everything from animal care and facilities maintenance to educational programming.

Chris found his way to the West Coast after graduating from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, with a B.S. in Zoology and Evolutionary Biology. In California, he worked for The Web Of Life Field School as Naturalist and Program Director. He taught thousands of kids about nature and Earth stewardship, all the while further cementing his love for outdoor education.

“Outdoor education is the only job I’ve had that, no matter how tired you are at the end of the week, you know what you’re doing is saving the planet.”

Today, Chris is the Museum’s Field Programs Coordinator. He leads interpretive programs at Neary Lagoon and Pogonip for school groups, as well as our Earth Stewards Program, which aims to empower the next generation of environmental stewards by providing STEM education to alternative education high school students through outdoor experiences. He creates curriculum for the Museum’s educational programs and delivers classroom presentations for local schools.

He’s eager to help program attendees push past their boundaries, meet and surpass the expectations of the newest generation of science standards, and keep comfortable in nature, no matter how distracted their world may become.

“The classroom experience is important,” he adds, “but it needs to be supplemented by students going outside and seeing science and nature in action — getting outside actually helps kids learn better.”