Natural History

The Indonesian island of Sulawesi is a 12,000-square-mile jigsaw puzzle. During the past 25 million years, drifting tectonic plates tore four separate paleo-islands from the far corners of the South Pacific and smashed them together in a steamy corner of Southeast Asia. This turbulent history has turned Sulawesi into a complex biological cipher. Today, it houses a mélange of species with confusing origins: some may have been passengers on the original islands, some may have arrived afterward, and some may have evolved from the mix. Jim McGuire, curator of herpetology at Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and a professor of integrative biology, is studying how these species evolved and came to be distributed on Sulawesi today.

Until recently, paleontologists had found only one dinosaur fossil that was identifyably female: a T. rex that was 18 and pregnant when it died. UC Berkeley researchers now report two more - fossil bones from a 10-year-old female Allosaurus and an 8-year-old female Tenontosaurus - that together indicate dinosaurs grew quickly and became sexually mature before reaching their adult size. Because these dinosaurs typically lived only 30 years, female dinosaurs got pregnant and laid eggs in adolescence.

Two San Francisco photographers set out for Yosemite National Park with writer-historian Rebecca Solnit to retrace the steps of famed photographer Eadward Muybridge. Their work is on display at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, alongside photos by Muybridge, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Carleton Watkins.

Oblivious to passersby, Mark Goodwin was on his knees in a muddy ditch near the San Jose airport, methodically removing clods of dirt to reveal the bones of one of the city's earliest residents, a mammoth. Goodwin, assistant director of the UC Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley, said the bones unearthed so far will help scientists learn more about the prehistoric denizens of the Bay Area.

Jere Lipps has an extraordinarily fine-grained view of history. As a professor of paleontology at UC Berkeley, Lipps examines records of the past written in layers of sediments and fossils. His work has shed light on ancient earthquakes and extinction patterns, the evolution of early life and even astrobiology, and taken him to more than 160 countries over the last 40 years.

"Mountains to Mouths," a 2007 wall calendar produced jointly by the campus's Water Resources Center Archives and Harmer E. Davis Transportation Library, illustrates the historical development of the intricate network of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping stations that delivers high-quality water to millions of thirsty people in the San Francisco Bay Area.