A cool place to have worked

I've been thinking a lot lately about my last job. I worked part- and full-time at UC Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. I started there in, hm, 1990? and left to work at my current company in June 1994.

The MVZ isn't a museum in the sense that you pay your money and stroll through the place, learning about zoology. It's a "working museum" that is a place where they have thousands and thousands of specimens of animals from throughout the world, and zoologists from all over come to study them. The place is teeming with graduate students, who are pretty darn cool to work with.

Anyway, the MVZ keeps popping back up in my life. When I was in Powell's a few weeks ago, I found a book by one of the professors, Harry Greene. When there was a paleontology story in the news a month or two ago, the guy who was quoted had been an MVZ grad student, Kevin Padian. And today, I was perusing Snopes and came across a quote by another MVZ professor, Ned Johnson (R.I.P., from cancer in 2003).