PSU Magazine Winter 1995

• 1nosaur he remains of what may be the first Californian to immigrate to Oregon lies embedded in rock in a building at the corner of Southwest S ixth and Hall across from the PSU Bookstore. The site is the Museum of Natural History Association, and the remains in question belong to a duck-billed dinosaur that lived 80 million years ago on land that drifted up from the south to become what is now Cape Sebastian in Oregon's Curry County. As the only known dinosaur artifact ever found in O regon, the specimen enjoys ce lebrity status among the 14 PSU Magazine thousand of pounds of ancient bones inhab iting the Museum Association's office. In its company is the near– complete ske leton of a triceratops, several wooly mammoth tusks, the jaws of an ancient elephant that once dined on clams on the Oregon coast, and plethora of bones from long-extinct species of dogs, sheep, and pigs. Not a convent ional mu eum , the site is more of a bone yard, a crypt of prehistoric remains that are encased in plaster, wrapped in newspaper, hidden in drawers, stuffed in cardboa rd boxes, and scattered across a broad floor in an order that makes sense only to its curator and director, Dave T ay lor. Associate Professor Dave Taylor with the bones of an ancient cousin to the elephant that once lived in Oregon. A PSU faculty member is helping to preserve Oregon's prehistoric record. By John Kirkland T aylor, a paleontologist and a PSU faculty member is Geology and Univer– sity Studies, spends hours orga nizing the co llection and answering ca lls from loca l schools and others interested in fossils. These days, he also is working to find a new home for the Assoc iation. The Museum Association has leased the space from PSU for the last two years. It needs a new location because PSU has plans to tum the current office into a conference facility. The as oc ia– tion's goa l is to some day have public exhibits. For now it remain a repository that includes more dinosaur material than anyplace in Oregon, and the largest collection of fossil marine mammals of anyplace in the Pacific Northwest. "The collections themselves– although they may not look this way-are rather remarkable. As a region– al resource, there really isn't anything else available loca lly," says T aylor, who touts the collection as an invaluable re ource for researchers and educators. For now the the public cannot come to see the foss il collection, so Tay lor takes the collection to the public. As an ambassador linking the ancient world with the modern school system, T aylor lectures to young students– many of whom, he says, know more about dinosaurs that most co llege students. His presence in the school -with his color slides and se lection of pecimens from the Association's ".ast