Roughly 13,000 years ago, Ice Age animals such as saber-toothed cats, the American lion and mammoths started going extinct in the Los Angeles basin, about a thousand years before their extinction in other parts of North America.
“This exhibit is unique because I think that we… everybody looks up at the night sky and sees the stars are laid before us,” said Lexie Briggs. “But I think that having these images and being able to get close to them and feel part of a larger sort of cosmos is really, really cool.”
Some of the libraries in Douglas County hosted Oregon Rocks! during the summer of 2023, and are looking to host the new summer program offered in 2024. “I think that the Museum of Natural and Cultural History does a fantastic job with their educational outreach,”
About five million years ago, the North American Pacific Northwest was teeming with some pretty big fish that would have made the continent’s biggest salmon runs look small. An eight to 10-feet-long prehistoric salmon species called Oncorhynchus rastrosus stalked the seas and streams of the Miocene. It weighed upwards of 400 pounds and was almost twice as long and three times heavier than today’s largest salmon species–the Chinook/king salmon.
Kent Gibson, of Newport, was selected as the recipient of the 2022 Katherine Palmer Award, nominated by Dr. Edward Davis of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History.
University of Oregon archaeology professor Scott Fitzpatrick says humans made similar advances thousands of years ago when they traveled vast distances to populate remote islands.
