DLESE description of Buena Vista Museum of Natural History

Working through public education, research, and by serving as a repository for fossils and other natural history items, the Buena Vista Museum promotes the scientific and educational aspects of earth history, particularly paleontology, biology, geology and anthropology. The Museum offers visitors exhibits reflecting the extensive Museum collections, including a nearly complete articulated skeleton of Allodesmus, a Miocene ancestor of modern sea lions. Also included in the collection are a fossil horse, rhino and other land mammal ancestors, while wood, nuts, pinecones, and other seed bodies represent the botanical world. The website offers a number of printable activities and worksheets for children, information and aerial photos of the San Andreas Fault, information on Dugongs, the Ancestry of Horses, McKittrick Tar Seeps, Mt. St. Helens, Yosemite Valley and more. Sharktooth Hill, the most fossil-rich Miocene marine bone bed in the world, is a local interpretive area for the Museum, with tours, digs, and exhibits of fossils from the site.