 So I think it was back in August when Beth approached Ray and I about coming to the library tonight and doing this event. And we were both very excited about it and the program was going to be very different because Ray was going to be here with us. But as many of you know, after a long life Ray died on December 23rd. But he and I had been talking about this program probably starting November 17th because November 16th was the last night that he did a night life at the academy. And the way that Ray and I worked was he always wanted to have an event planned that he was thinking about. So I had to be careful not to tell him a date too early because then he would lose sleep at night because he'd be planning the table and where he would put things and writing the cards and everything. So I waited until November 17th after we finished the November 16th thing and told him about January 31st that this was the date. So we talked about it a lot and I wrote down all the specimens that he wanted me and he wanted us to bring that night and actually the day before he died the last thing he told me was to bring the spider monkey skull which is on the little table in the front because it's the one near the seats near the chairs because he wanted you all to see the difference between a nocturnal monkey and a daytime monkey. So those are here because I was told to make sure I brought them here. So it's probably not the way he would have set up the skulls. They probably would have been in a different order but I did the best that I can and it's all Ray's labels for all the skulls. So I first met Ray in 2002 when I became a curatorial assistant at the California Academy of Sciences and my first day of work was packing skulls in his house for the skulls exhibit which I did not know was going to be part of my job. So here we're here tonight mostly to see the film and the film is now here at the library. So people can borrow the life with skulls. Beth Cataldo will talk to us later but you can now borrow it from the library. So that was the impetus of this whole event was that the library now has the the movie here but here's a picture of Ray that Beth took in his museum. So Ray became a field associate with the California Academy of Sciences in 1953 and remains so I think his last field collection was in 2013. He collected more than 6,000 skulls probably close to 7,000 6100 of them have catalog numbers. He collected all of those under the Cal Academy permits but really Ray was an extraordinary volunteer. He covered the area from Anya Nuevo to Bodega Bay. He would get phone calls at his house. Everybody knew his phone number. All the beach watch people probably had it memorized some of you probably still do and all the lifeguards knew his number too. So we didn't have a hotline at the time Ray's phone was the hotline and he would go out to any dead marine mammal that he got reports of. Now he had started this in 1953. The Marine Mammal Protection Act came into effect in the 1970s and the Marine Mammal Stranding Network was formed as well. So as permitting became part of the procedure Ray was collecting under all Cal Academy permits. So not only did he go out to the beaches and collect skulls and data the really important part was the data where the animal was when it was there how big it was if it was a male or female but he also prepared all the skulls at his house so or some of them in the lab at the academy. I often tell tours when we go to our stinky lab in the museum the old lab used to be up on top of the roof and Ray would come over after school and clean skulls and work. These are some of the pictures of him when he was teaching and we'd get calls from downstairs the main exhibit floor because he'd be dumping these stinky buckets and the air intake valve for the entire museum was right outside the door and they'd say Ray Ray stop what you're doing we're having a wedding down here or something. So he would spend many many late nights cleaning skulls either at his house or in the museum laboratory. I'm going to show you a few of his favorites so this was a Baird's Beaked Whale we only have three or four of them in the collection this was the third one that we collected and Ray basically single-handedly removed the skull from that animal on ocean beach and then you can see in the picture a year later when it was cleaned after being buried he was always showing it off whenever he came into the museum collection. This sperm whale was the first whale that I ever worked on with Ray and was one of his last big whale adventures it was a difficult place to get to so he only went to it once but it had 400 pounds of net in its stomach and if you go to the Marine Mammal Center they have a sculpture made from that net so that was a that was a very exciting one and he worked very hard along with Kerry Sorenson another volunteer to take all the teeth out of that animal for the museum. This was the last whale I think Phalyne's favorite picture this is a pelvic bone of a whale which Ray always said was the hardest bone to find in a whale's body but is actually the easiest bone to collect because when you're working on a large whale it's the smallest thing and the easiest thing to get off of the beach so we actually have the pelvic bone of this blue whale from Bean Hollow the one he's holding in his hand all dirty and messy from just coming out of the whale it's here in the front and it's next to a humpback whale pelvic bone so since Ray taught me how to find pelvic bones we collect pelvic bones from every whale that we work on these days so Ray loved doing events he would have loved to have been here tonight he would love the question and answer section he would have loved answering all your questions as you look at the skulls he particularly liked the Halloween event supernatural he often would have four tables set up and tons of kids and and parents all would come to that event and he always insisted on wearing this eland mask which freaked me out but he all the kids loved it for some reason but but he would also do every other month we would do a nightlife event together members nights special events for openings of exhibits and things but Ray's real accomplishment was the skulls exhibit and he single-handedly curated the first skulls exhibit in 2003 earlier today I found a big piece of paper where he had drawn out every single case and what he wanted in each case it was amazing and that was when I first started I didn't understand the breadth of this exhibit but he wrote every label and decided every specimen and there were over 1800 specimens in that exhibit it was redone in 2014 he helped with it but by then we had a different exhibits team and they did all the designing this is the sea lion wall from the original and the current one is now up in the museum he also loved to give tours which Jacob is continuing that tradition he would give tours of the museum whenever he could whenever people asked or when people wanted to do interviews and then the the museum was always available to researchers so the reason he collected all these skulls was for scientific research for the research collection so sometimes researchers came to the academy collection and then went over to his house to see the rest of the specimens and now that he is no longer with us his collection will move to the academy and will be there so although tours won't be available at the house anymore they will the specimens will be at the collection so they'll join over 32 000 specimens that are in the mammal collection that will be available to researchers from around the world and there will be over 6500 marine mammals one of the largest marine mammal collections in the world and because of Ray's collection we have the largest collection of california sea lions of any museum anywhere in the world there are the sea lions we also have the largest southern sea otter collection and the largest guadalupe fur seal collection mostly because of the work that Ray did so you can continue to visit the sea lion wall which hangs above the project lab at the museum that will be there indefinitely and on may 24th the academy along with Ray's family we're going to have a special bones nightlife the whole the theme for the entire night will be bones and we'll set up as many of Ray's displays as we can and now i think it's time to let you see the movie so what motivated me was his ability to tell stories about the natural world and uh there we'll see it one more time uh and i'd never seen anyone like this before and i wasn't really into science as unlike moe i mean i just came i was much more into technology and when i went to this backstage tour and ray told us about those skulls it really opened my eyes to another way to live in the world it was really interesting so i wanted to make a movie about him but i had no idea what it would be and then i met all these other people and they told these stories about ray but in the end my goal of this movie was to really showcase someone who has lived his life in a very creative way but a very positive way that added to science because i think we don't get enough media that talks about people like this but i know there are so many there's a lot of beach watch volunteers here tonight and you people are very similar they give back to the world and live in this very generous way and um call them citizen scientists i think ray is a really um proud citizen science um and so i really wanted to celebrate that and uh and so i i think it does it really celebrates who he was he as his wife said at the end i think that's my favorite quote in the movie they were very free people they lived very exciting lives but they added to the positive so that's kind of my goal in in making this movie about ray anyhow it was there a question i think i saw a hand over there and we'll wait for the mic okay this man in the front row yeah hello my name's tody colonies i was one of the managers of the zoo it's not so much a question as a remembrance i started the zoo in 1971 and there was this fellow who would appear over by we didn't even have an animal hospital then he'd appear over by the freezer and oh i got the word that that's ray he's the skull guy from the academy i thought he worked at the academy all the all that time so that's news to me even now but um doc matron would call ray up in the middle of the night and say we're we lost something and the keepers would get there at seven three in the morning we'd see ray over by over by the freezer they come over and say ray what died he knew about you knew about it before we did yeah the zoo animals added a lot of depth to ray's collection and they will to the academy collection as well and there was a specific researcher she's still around she works on primates and i know that she and ray had several situations where one time she got out there and she said ray this one's mine you're not getting it but she had to take it with the arrangement that it would eventually come up to ray after she was done with her muscle research the first i want to just want to thank you for making that great film i really really loved it ray was kind of an obsessive person as doug long sort of said to the side there and i know have known some other collections managers who also have a kind of obsessive quality and i i love the way they've kind of converted this desire to keep collecting to keep going going going and turned it into something really beautiful and helpful and and and positive and uh i am wondering if there's anybody here who knows exactly how ray found that that that trick that is you know when um collecting skulls as a compulsion became collecting skulls as a contribution well i think he probably knew that from the beginning because when he was in high school he would bring specimens to the steinhard aquarium to have them not marine mammals but you know different reptiles and amphibians that he found and insects and things so he always understood the value of collecting the specimen but also collecting the data with the specimen so that first animal in 1953 the first harbour seal we know it's the he wrote on the skull it's you know the data is all there and it's actually number 53 or 54 53 in his collection which means that before that he had brought other things and kept the data so i think it came with his love of science even from a very young age and he did grow up near the academy of sciences whether that made a difference i don't know if his family has any insight into that but you know i think again what you're near i think speaks to you so maybe that just pulled him in from an early age but he did always collect creepy crawlies as he would say that's where he started and i don't know if he had any mentors or anything he never mentioned any names to me yes he was a mentor to many of us that is true any other questions for those of us who can stomach the the craft other is there any plans in the works for like a like a skull and blown club kind of uh for volunteers to learn and carry on some of that so we do at the academy we do have a number of volunteers that come in and work for us and i you know ask people to apply through our volunteer services we do require people to start cleaning disgusting skulls because that's a really good way to to know if a volunteer is going to stick around for very long if they can clean skulls in the stinky lab then they're they win oh yeah yeah i encourage you to apply a couple questions oh thank you good to see you again mo christ journey here from tree fog and i wanted to say two things one was a comment and one was a question so years ago when i first met ray was down at the academy it's sort of the beer on the non balcony in the herpetology room and the in the depths and the anals of the old academy when i was a young young guy like probably a teenager and um i was working on a few things having fun and so then he was really inviting and inclusive about all sorts of things that we could do together and i was just you know this like this little flea on the whale of the academy and that never changed he was as inclusive and open and welcoming and warm to everybody he ever met which i think is um hugely important to to shine a positive light on uh just anybody can do science sciences everywhere this this doesn't matter if you're smart or new or naive just check it out so fast forward to 2003 when that beards beak whale went uh went on the shore i was uh courting a young woman who became my wife we were walking on the beach at sunset and ray shot up to me he recognized me guys grace there's a beards beak whale on the beach we got to take its head off okay this this is before he even really introduced himself to my girlfriend nicole and she knew ray from just me being around the academy working there and stuff like that so she said give me a ride home i'll see you later so i gave her a ride home i lived on fourth and urban came back down and of course once again he was just like yeah this is a really great opportunity told me the whole story at midnight we got busted by the national park service police so to speak and as you said these crazy calls so i'm this guy the the guy doesn't want to hear anything id said okay and i gave him my license and ray gave him his license and showed him the uh cal academy badge but didn't stop cutting the whole time when the guy is talking to and he's like come back tomorrow gentlemen so i left and then of course uh douglas long came down and for days and days we worked on this thing and sadly not sadly but it's funny like he broke the um zygomatic arch you know of that elephant well the same thing happened kind of the beards beak a little bit they needed to get it off the beach because stupid things were happening like gangs were tagging etc and they pulled it and every single person in the world came out to help right the lifeguards the volunteers everywhere they you know deflated tires and a troop of cars came out onto the sands that they could have been stranded there and they finally got that thing off and they buried it and redid it so the comment was that he was really you know inclusive and the question is how can we keep that kind of positivity around in this day and age of you know quick and dirty communication not not real face time you talk about face time of course he wore that jacket for 35 years i mean i don't even he had like seven nicknames beyond bones let's put it that way if we could base on the smell of that jacket and it was all good so that's my question and i want to salute everybody here for supporting right thank you yeah i mean there's one thing kelly is doing this program tonight and i think there are a lot of opportunities to do citizen science in the bay area and i know there's a lot of beach watchers here tonight how many beach watch people are here so beach watch for example is a program where we're trained and then we go out every month to survey beaches and collect data about live and dead things and there's a relationship among those people but it's not as maybe vibrant as working with ray but i think there's a lot of organizations and i know kelly is trying to get these bio blitzes out from the library with people working in community to actually go out together and enjoy nature but add to science so i do think technology has helped us on the way to work as groups but um we have to search it out we really do have to search it out rather than staying in front of our computers yeah i also think one of the things ray instilled in myself and some of the people who work with me and is whenever we're out on the beach this we do the same thing that he used to do we always stop and interact with the public and answer their questions and sometimes we get peed on by dogs but we still we still stop and people always have questions and they're so curious about what's going on and the more information we can get out there the better and you have a question since i'd never heard of him or this before i was wondering i mean if he and i will try and see the house before you know it all goes to the academy but if it all goes to the academy why hasn't it already gone earlier why has it always been in his house if it is so important to science and to you um why when this academy was rebuilt didn't you create space and maybe even a lab again for him to do that or maybe you have one meanwhile and you know he's still not doing it at home but could you explain it all of the above so in the new academy we did include the amount of space that raised collection would take when we designed the the collection storage area so hopefully we will have enough room for all of it and believe me over the years i have tried to get some of it to come over you know it's more than six thousand skulls that we're looking at moving now um but he always he loved his museum and he loved being able to sit in the museum and look at everything and just be surrounded by the bones so we never pressured him and researchers were always welcome and i would make arrangements and you have to warn them a little bit you know about the house and it's so full of stuff and it's there's not a lot of room for work but he was always open to them coming up there so they were still available to scientists they were just in an offsite storage location that i would have liked to have had them integrated into the collection when we moved back to the new building in 2008 but that's okay they'll come now and we do have a lab in the new building that smells just as bad as the old lab did and ray worked in that lab as well wow okay well i did ask want to ask you a real question which is um with the trends in our education and so many of the old zoology departments are and the commitment to natural to natural science studies field studies and so on being moved into integrated biology or whatever what is it and your collection is that you curated so remarkable what do you think is the fate of all these very large collections in the modern age modern world well i think one of the things that's happening with collections is people are developing new tools to study collections so for example just a couple of weeks ago i sent off a large piece of adult male blue whale baleen that was collected in 1979 to a researcher who's studying hormones in in whales large whales and what they can look at is look at the hormones and the stress hormones and they can see where the whales suffered stress and where they were geographically when that happened so technology has allowed scientists to ask more in depth questions you can look back at specimens and compare the environmental conditions that they lived in using technology stable isotopes from the past to current day and that can tell you a little bit about climate change and it can give you more information on the influences of the environment on those animals so even though not as many people are doing morphology studies the traditional studies with museum specimens there are so many new technologies that are coming out with CT scans and stable isotopes and hormones and aging things with growth layers and teeth and baleen that i think there will always be a use for it and it's important to continue to build those collections so that a hundred years from now people can look back at our time period and study the stable isotopes and the animals from now compared to the ones a hundred years ago compared to the ones a hundred years from now and be able to tell some stories and understand the environment thanks for putting this film together it was fantastic so um i have one brief excuse me question and then a second one to follow up um one the brief one is i see a couple folks wearing the necklaces is there some and he was as well in the movie is there some significance to the actual bone are they special in any way he had about six different bone ties this one has a number on it which means it's cataloged and it's an elk vertebrae i'm not sure which one jacob has tiger vertebrae he almost always wore the hyena which i couldn't actually find today but ray whenever he went out to an event he wore his fancy pants and his fancy striped shirt and he had a carved comb in his upper pocket and he always wore a bone tie so for tonight we thought we'd wear some bone ties so these are from his collection from the collection yeah yeah jacob says nephew yeah oh they're great nephew excellent family here okay one more i'm sorry just had one quick other question i just want to make sure i'm interpreting something correctly during the movie he was talking uh something about a license or something do did he have to have us do you or anyone have to have a special license to do this sort of so marine mammals endangered species and birds are all protected species so in order to have parts any parts even if you just find something somewhere you can't prove that you didn't kill have something to do with killing that animal so we are part of the marine mammal stranding network which gives us authorization from the national marine fisheries service to respond to any dead marine mammal and then we have all the us fish and wildlife service permits for migratory birds so ray as a field associate with us was covered under all of those permits okay thank you so over here well done on the film thank you i'm wondering what additional information might be within the rest of the skeletal remains the film talked about the significance of the skull but if there's other data in the rest of the skeleton if there's any effort by the academy others to collect those bones as well in some cases we do collect larger skeletons so for example over the past couple of years there have been there's been a diapho guadalupe fur seals the endangered species that we actually have the female here with the jaw that he was talking about I had the really old female with all of her teeth missing so we will make choices about collecting entire skeletons based on the value of that specimen so because we had so few of that species to begin with we would keep the entire skeleton two from every county that washed up this was in the past two years but in general we do stick to collecting the skulls because and as Ray said it's the easiest thing to get off the beach if it's a large animal like we an orca we collected an entire orca in 2011 which took five really difficult trips to the beach and a lot of 37 people helped me get that whole orca off the beach so we just make the choice with resources and the value but really most of the value is in the skull with the teeth and the brain case and you can learn a lot from the skulls and I think one thing maybe that was not spelled out is that like when Mo or someone else goes out on the beach they try to do a necropsy on the dead animal to see how it died so they'll examine it for any other information that they can get from it on the beach so a lot of times they will know how it died when they leave it and it'll be like one time su pemberton is the one who goes out there now and she was like Beth did you know that was a shark bite I'm like no glad you went out so so they can tell a lot of times how an animal has died and they'll take that data on the beach thank you thank you Beth it's a wonderful film the early one of the early specimens that had the even teeth you know all do we have any idea why that was the case so one of the things that we've learned recently is in a lot of cases if animals are eating sharks their teeth will wear down consistently across the board so there's a bottlenose dolphin here who also had its teeth worn down to the gum line and that orca that I just mentioned was a young animal because it was known from life with its teeth worn down to the gum line sharks have skin that has what's called dermal denticles so it's like sandpaper so as they bite on the the shark skin it wears down their teeth over time that's the theory we know it's true with orcas we don't always know that it's true with other animals but dolphins don't chew so they this wear is probably from dermal denticles from skin this is probably a stupid question but whenever I see a sea lion its nose is always physically the highest point on its body and if I did that I'd have a stiff neck I'm wondering I mean is there any there probably is a physiological reason for that that I don't know because I deal with mostly dead animals but there's marine mammal people here so maybe anyone know yeah go up to the marine mammal center and ask them they'll know does anyone know the answer to that because they can raise their head the least amount and still extract air so no energy is giving off you hi I'm Mike I'm actually a cousin of Ray's my mom was his first cousin so I can't add any of the scientific and but I can give you a little flavor on the family side as a young child I never went to that Ray's house because I was afraid because not only afraid of the skulls but he also had some live reptiles at his house not legal and that was they were poisonous and so that as a kid was a little scary to think about going there and as lovely as he is he was known as being a little bit eccentric in our family I've never worn a bone tie myself but at our wedding he of course had his bone tie and was very proud of that would always be very proud of of his dress and another time I think there was a party because he always as you said had the striped blue shirt and the big comb in his pocket which was actually in your movie quite a few times his comb sticks out and he was there was a surprise party it was his 60th birthday party and they told him he was going to someone else's party and he got there and everyone had those shirts on and the and the combs in his pocket and he was just I think it was too much for him he kind of you know too much sure but you know obviously he was a lovely man and we enjoyed having him as part of our family I might have always been very proud that I can talk about his house and and such one last thing as as a small child that they hadn't he had a number of cousins my my mother was there was 10 brothers and sisters above them so there's a number of children and they used to go away on the summer altogether to Los Gatos which was then you know kind of the country and Ray talked about it that he used to as a small child go and collect reptiles you know in the going along the creek and and just collecting things which I'm sure my mother and other cousins were thrilled to have him come back with at the end of his outing so I think he was always from day one like that um I I didn't know Ray so I'm not familiar with the family but um is his um lovely wife still with us she is yeah excellent good oh she's at home tonight she's uh 90 years old how old is 88 she'll be 89 in july yep anything else we gotta don't be shy you mentioned that the whale skull was one of his favorites but I'm just curious like what were his favorite animals favorite skull that really like got him you know what um it's funny I just was writing a book with Ray and took a bunch of photos of his favorite skulls and was working with him and he passed away the day after I kind of gave him the first draft so I finished the book um and I'll have copies for sale if anyone wants it in the back later and that has most of his favorite skulls um but I think this Guadalupe first seal was one of his is she over there and she's in the movie her um her uh he was just fascinated by this old female who had climbed up on the beach and her you know her state of of um kind of life and death was in this skull and I think he really found that skull one of his the most fascinating ones and he had a couple ones that had like teeth in them he had one I think bear that had it uh was it a mountain line tooth stuck in its head but it didn't get killed by the mountain line it was actually shot by a hunter and that one he found fascinating I don't know so you know well whenever you would ask him what his favorite skull was he could never he would never answer that question so really pulling these images out in these individual specimens was the bears was maybe not his favorite but he talked about it a lot and whenever we did events he'd always want the bear to speak will come out if it could along with you know the narwhal and the the cancer deer and he had a whole list of things but it was really hard for him to name a fate there's no one favorite that he had I think he really appreciated them all for the art and for the science that they were he did tell me a week before he died that he wanted to bring some bones from the living room I'm just remembering this now and I'm very sorry that I didn't bring them tonight because he said I want to bring like the it was someone's femur one of the femurs from the living room of the house or the pelvic bone of the elephant or something because he wanted to talk to you all about how these bones not only represented science but were really pieces of art and he said I want to get up there and I want to do you think there'll be time for me to get up and talk about the art involved and I forgot about that so I'm sorry I remembered the nocturnal monkey but I forgot about the bone from maybe the elephant's pelvis yes so you can just imagine it was between alchemy and ray the art was really a big part of it as well in the sculpture of the bones okay thank you all for coming yeah