Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology
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| Established | 1968 |
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| Location | Claremont, California |
| Coordinates | 34°07′25″N 117°44′20″W / 34.123545°N 117.738898°W |
| Type | Natural history museum |
| Director | Don Lofgren, PhD |
| Curator | Andrew Farke, PhD |
| Website | alfmuseum.org |
The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is part of The Webb Schools and is the only nationally accredited museum of paleontology on a secondary school campus in the United States. The museum has two circular 4,000 sq. ft. exhibition halls and 20,000 unique annual visitors. The collections number about 140,000 specimens, 95% of which were found by Webb students on fossil-collecting trips called “Peccary Trips,” expeditions usually centered in California, Utah, and Montana. The collections consist primarily of vertebrate, invertebrate, and track fossils and the museum's large track collection is widely recognized as one of the most diverse in the world.
The museum has three full-time staff, two of whom are research paleontologists who conduct research with Webb students in a specialized curriculum through The Webb Schools' Science Department.
In 1929, nationally acclaimed sprinter Raymond Alf arrived in Los Angeles to run for the L.A. Track Club. After the track season ended, Alf found a job teaching science at the Webb School of California, a boarding school on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Alf’s paleontology career unofficially began in 1935, when he spotted a fossil horse jaw at a photo shop and learned that it was found near Barstow. Intrigued, Alf then gathered Webb students and went in search of fossils in the Barstow desert. On that first trip, Bill Webb, son of the Webb School’s founder Thompson Webb, found a fossil skull. Alf and Bill Webb took the specimen to Chester Stock, a paleontologist from the California Institute of Technology, who identified it as a new species of Miocene-age peccary. Inspired by the discovery of "Dyseohys fricki", Alf began the long-standing museum tradition of leading summer and weekend paleontology expeditions (known as Peccary Trips) for Webb students to fossil-rich areas in the western United States.
On the first Summer Peccary trip in Nebraska in 1937, Alf met Professor John Clark from the University of Colorado who encouraged Alf to become a paleontologist. Alf took a sabbatical and completed his master’s degree in geology at the University of Colorado in a single academic year. When he returned to Webb to teach, Alf added paleontology into his biology curriculum and established a small museum in the basement of the school's library. Alf’s enthusiasm for paleontology was unrelenting and throughout the 1950s and 1960s he led hundreds of peccary trips. Consequently, the student paleontology program at Webb became a school tradition. Spurred by Alf’s inspirational teaching, a number of Webb students became distinguished paleontologists, including the late Malcolm McKenna (Class of 1948, Columbia University/ Frick Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History) and Dwight Taylor (Class of 1949, he was one the world’s foremost malacologists, specializing in gastropods), as well as David Webb (Class of 1953, retired Curator of Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History), and Daniel Fisher (Class of 1967, currently a curator at the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan).
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