Billion Year Walk

Time: The Time Portal will be operational from 10:00am to 4:00pm

Location: Rotary Nature Center, Lake Merritt, 600 Bellevue Avenue, Oakland

Take the family through a Time Portal to a billion years in the past, then walk back to the year 2019 around Lake Merritt (5 km = 3.1 miles) with 42 signs describing the history of our Earth and its life. Docents will show you fossils and answer your questions as you travel through time around the lake and back to the Rotary Nature Center. Start any time 10am – 4pm; the Center will close at 5.

Take a selfie with dinosaurs! Test your recall with a science quiz. Younger scientists will be issued a passport and will get a tiny dinosaur toy at the end. Snacks, water, & toys while they last. It’s all free!

The Billion-Year Walk is sponsored by the Bay Area Skeptics, the National Center for Science Education, the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and the Frederick E. Hart Foundation for Educational Opportunity.

Download a PDF version of this page.

We need you to help run this educational family event. See our Volunteer Information Page

Questions? Text or call David Almandsmith at 510-304-4071

Virtual Skeptics in the Pub

WHAT: Virtual Skeptics in the Pub

FOCUS: Becoming better consumers of information

This is a casual night of socializing with fellow skeptics who live in various locations around the oblate spherical planet Earth.

Please join us! This is a free event brought to you by Bay Area Skeptics. All are welcome.

WHEN: Wednesday December 25, 7-9pm Pacific (GMT-8)

HOW: Online. Join HERE. Passcode: 1023

SkepTalk

Ann Gibbons

WHAT: Lone Survivors: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Us

In the past decade, new studies of ancient DNA from fossils have shown that, until as recently as 40,000 years ago, our ancestors shared the planet with two close relatives, the Neanderthals and a mysterious group called the Denisovans. Both of those groups became extinct, but traces of their DNA remain in the genomes of modern humans. Meanwhile, researchers are discovering diverse types of human ancestors who were living at the same time in the same fossil sites millions of years ago, suggesting that we were never alone—that there were always other types of hominins alive in Africa and elsewhere on the planet until recently. Join us for a discussion with Ann Gibbons about new research that has changed perceptions of the Neanderthals, shed new light on the mysterious Denisovans, and our place in the human family tree.

WHO: Ann Gibbons is a contributing correspondent for Science magazine and the author of The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors, which was a finalist for the LA Times best science and technology book. She also has taught science writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and written about human evolution for National Geographic, SLATE, Smithsonian magazine and other publications. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she was also a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a science writing fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

She was awarded the 2019 American Geophysical Union’s Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, the 2018 and 2013 National Academy of Sciences Communication Awards for best magazine/newspaper article; the 2014 Society of American Archaeology Gene S. Stuart Award; and the 2012 Anthropology in Media Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) for a decade’s worth of stories on human origins and evolution.

WHEN: Thursday January 9 at 6:30PM PT (GMT -8)

HOW: (details coming soon)