Hands-on experience

Walking through the first few exhibits in the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology’s Hall of Life, visitors will be struck by its unique spirit: a Bill Nye-like mix of serious science and whimsy. There, near a huge cast of an allosaurus, right next to a tusk-filled “touch” table, visitors will encounter Marge, Betsy, Harold, Richard and Marvin.

Those are the nicknames given to a quintet of brontotherium skulls, which are joined in the gallery by a 32-million-year-old Hyaenodon horridus named Helen and a 45-million-year-old titantothere named Dumbo. Credit the creative cataloging to the curatorial staff of the museum who found the items: the high school students of the private Webb Schools in Claremont.

The Alf Museum is the only one of its kind in North America -- a fully accredited paleontology facility on the grounds of a high school campus. More than 95% of the fossils in the museum were collected by Webb students and staff on “peccary trips” throughout the years.

The museum is named for the late Webb School biology and math teacher, Raymond Alf, who was known for his hands-on approach to teaching. On a 1937 trip to the Mojave Desert, Alf and one of his students discovered the skull of a 15-million-year-old new species of fossil pig known as a peccary. Subsequent journeys became known as peccary trips.

The Alf Museum was born out of necessity: Teacher and pupils collected so many fossils, they needed a place to store them. In 1968, the circular Alf Museum, designed by Millard Sheets, was opened on the Webb campus. More than three decades later, however, not many people know about the nonprofit institution, which drew about 16,000 visitors last year and receives its funding from an annual drive and an endowment.

Continuing Alf’s philosophy of teaching by doing, students at the Webb Schools are treated as scientists. Their paleontology and geology studies are supplemented by a museum studies after-school program and field work. On short weekend trips, often to Barstow, and longer peccary trips in the summer, students collect artifacts, take notes that will be displayed later in the museum, prep and catalog fossils and showcase the items in the museum.

“The trips are awesome,” said 16-year-old Katie Kent of Upland, a veteran of several trips who soon will join 17 others on an excursion to Utah and Montana. “It’s exciting finding stuff that people haven’t seen for millions and millions of years. It’s not something that a lot of people get to do, so you feel really privileged.”

Museum director Don Lofgren agreed. “It’s like a treasure hunt for the kids,” he said, while noting it can be hard work. “Sometimes we’ll find something miles away from camp and then have to carry it a long way back.” Delicate items often are placed in plaster jackets that require several people to carry.

The students’ hard work has resulted in a nationally recognized museum whose fossilized track collection is regarded as one of the largest and most diverse in the United States.

The upper level of the museum traces the history of Earth from the first cells through human civilization. It includes fossilized invertebrates, dinosaurs and their eggs, and reptile prints and trackways from around the world.

The lower level, called the Hall of Footprints, is especially kid-friendly “because it’s very hands-on,” said Heather Moffat, the museum’s director of education. Kids can dig for fossils in a pit, assemble an allosaurus from wooden puzzle pieces, recreate dinosaur sounds using an accordion-style box and sit in a dinosaur footprint. “Please touch!” signs are prominent. The entire space is scattered with drawers containing everything from Jurassic Park Crunch Cereal to tools of the trade: plaster, ice picks and toilet paper.

Older visitors, not hip to trilobites and crinoids, will enjoy videos of students wielding pickaxes and shovels on previous trips as well as a 1939 camping video of Ray Alf cooking coffee and eggs over an open flame. “Twenty days is the max for our kids to camp,” Lofgren said with a grin. “But Alf used to take them for a lot longer.”

The Hall of Footprints also houses a pair of windows through which visitors can see students working in the specimen room and the fossil prep lab during the school year.

The museum holds many activities throughout the year, including science camps, fossils classes, monthly family days, after-school programs in paleontology for second- through fourth-graders, lectures and a reptile class.

But for junior paleontologists, the museum’s collection of fossils, casts and footprints is all that is needed to sustain an afternoon of interest.

“It’s like finding out where we came from and learning how the world was created,” Kent said. “It’s really exciting to see everything come together like that.”

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Ancient oddities

The Alf Museum houses more than 70,000 fossils, some as old as 600 million years. Highlights of some of the oldest and strangest on display:

* Fossilized skin impressions from a Cretaceous-aged hadrosaur, otherwise known as a duck-billed dinosaur, which Webb students found on a trip to Montana. It is one of only a dozen found in the U.S.

* Large fossilized wing of quetzalcoatlus, the largest pterosaur that ever lived.

* Skeleton of the giant bear-dog amphicyon mounted above the only known trackway of the ancient predator, discovered in Barstow.

* Dinosaur eggs from France and the desert of Mongolia.

* Raindrop impressions on a 250-million-year-old slab of Coconino Sandstone, from Seligman, Ariz.

* Complete skeletal cast of an llosaurus. The skeleton actually is a cast from the bones of five partial skeletons uncovered at a single quarry in central Utah.

* Camel tracks from the Mojave Desert that are 15 million years old. There are two sets of camel tracks on a sandstone slab. The camels that left the tracks were smaller than modern camels (more the size of llamas).

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Can you dig it?

What: Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology.

Where: 1175 W. Baseline Road, Claremont.

Hours: Mondays-Fridays, 8 a.m.

-noon and 1-4 p.m. (Also, Saturdays from

noon-3 p.m. beginning Sept. 13).

Closed July 4.

Admission: $3. Children 4 and younger, free. Wednesdays, free admission.

Info: (909) 624-2798.