The University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) collection was begun in 1874.  Specimens have been collected from archaeological sites around the world.

Today, the UCMP houses (within three northern California storage locations) the largest paleontological collection of any university in the world!  And it is the second or third largest collection available in the U.S. (after the Smithsonian, and possibly the National Museum of Natural History).

It is only open to the public (only about 100 tour tickets available) one day per year.  These photos (50 - free to copy & use) were taken on that day, "Cal Day" at U.C. Berkeley, April 17, 2004.  (This back room tour was also informally video taped by myself.)

Almost all items are sequestered away in large lockers and on long shelves.  The few items brought out for the day of public viewing are only samples.

There are some 1.5 million slides of microscopic fossils in the research collection.  There are oil well samples from over 75,000 wells. There are over 200,000 fossil plant specimens; over 60,000 fossil invertebrates; and over 150,000 fossil vertebrate specimens.

Not everything is fully cataloged (as is also true in the Smithsonian, British Museum, and other large research institutions).  Once the paper gets turned in or published - the researcher's focus moves on to other things.  You did the same thing in school, right?  Scientists are just like anyone else.  Completing the paper or project is the focus, not fully cataloging every item collected, photographed, or used.

The name of each image below is also its description.  These are FREE for you to copy and use.  Download the ZIP file below (at night, please, due to our bandwidth limitations) for all photos along with this "index.htm" page.

   Paul Abramson
www.creationism.org
 
P.S.  Also - as in other large museums - odd items like human-made dragon/dinosaur images (molded images and drawings), OOPArts (so-called: "out-of-place artifacts"), or photos of human footprints in layers where they're "not supposed to be" would be shelved away, out of sight.  Evolutionists do not typically display (nor often discuss) items which openly violate their beliefs about our origins due to their underlying contention that "answering to God is not important" in our lives today.  Removing God as Earth's Creator and Owner was the primary purpose for evolutionary beliefs in the first place, in spite of all the scientific evidence to the contrary.