Sharks, salamanders, tyrannosaurs, and turtles — Oh my!

The Big Horn Basin Dinosaur and Geoscience Museum’s summer lecture series continues this month with Dr. Andrew Farke, the director of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in Claremont, Calif.
Dr. Farke will give a talk at the Greybull Public Library on Thursday, June 13, at 6 p.m., and discuss “Sharks, Salamanders, Tyrannosaurs, and Turtles: Strange Neighbors in the Mesaverde Formation of Cretaceous Wyoming.”
Dr. Farke’s research has taken him into the field around the world, from the American West to Madagascar, in pursuit of knowledge on Late Cretaceous-period fauna and biogeography. Since 2008, Dr. Farke has worked as the curator and director of the Alf Museum.
The Alf Museum is located on the campus of the Webb School in Claremont, Calif., and is the only nationally accredited museum on a high school campus in the nation. It began in 1929 with Raymond Alf, a teacher, who went on paleontological digs as a hobby. Alf and one of his students discovered a 15-million year old specimen on a dig in the Mojave desert in 1936, which was identified and confirmed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology in nearby Pasadena. Following this, Alf’s fossil hunting trips became core parts of the Webb Schools’ programming and a permanent museum was established in the 1960s.