page_title: The Webb Schools
section_title: Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology
hierarchical_section_title: The Webb Schools / Campus / Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology
caption_attribution_description: English: This photo shows the facade of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology located on The Webb Schools campus, Claremont, CA.
context_page_description: The Webb Schools is the collective name for two private schools for grades 9-12, founded by Thompson Webb, located in Claremont, California. The Webb School of California for boys was established in 1922, and the Vivian Webb School for girls in 1981. Both are primarily boarding schools, but they also enroll a limited number of day students. The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is a part of The Webb Schools.
  The schools share a campus of approximately 150 acres in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. In 2018, Webb purchased undeveloped land next to the existing campus and will now preserve the hillside and create a buffer between the campus and suburban development. There are 410 students and 57 faculty members, of which 25% hold doctorates, 80% hold advanced degrees and 74% live on campus. Annual tuition is $66,130 for boarding students and $47,035 for day students, including meals, books, and fees. For the 2018-2019 school year, Webb offered $4.9 million in need-based financial aid awards.
  The majority of ninth- and tenth-grade classes are taught in a single-sex environment. Co-educational courses are introduced to upperclassmen.
context_section_description: Webb is the only high school in the United States with a nationally accredited museum, and the only high school in the world with a paleontology museum on campus. The Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology is named for long-time Webb science teacher Raymond M. Alf (1905–1999). In the late 1930s, Alf and several students found a fossil skull in the Mojave Desert in the Barstow area. This discovery of a new species of Miocene-age peccary, Dyseohyus fricki, inspired additional fossil-hunting trips in the western United States with student groups.
  Alf continued his pursuit of paleontology by earning his master's degree from the University of Colorado. The fossil hunting continued when Alf returned to Webb and he subsequently created a small museum in the basement of Jackson Library to house his collection of thousands of fossils. As the collection eventually outgrew the shelves in Alf's classroom and the library basement, the museum moved to its own campus building in 1968. Today the museum is professionally curated by Dr. Donald "Doc" Lofgren, and is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. The museum features one of the largest collections of fossil animal footprints in the world, including the original peccary skull found in 1937. The Alf Museum continues to sponsor paleontology field excursions over the summers and has contributed to the discovery of new species like Gryposaurus monumentensis, in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. The fossils were removed and identified in collaboration with the University of Utah and the national monument.
  The latest in the museum's impressive discoveries includes "Joe," the baby Parasaurolophus. The dinosaur's 75 million-year-old fossilized remains were found by a Webb student in the summer of 2009. It took three years to completely excavate "Joe" from a ridge deep in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, including a helicopter lift out of the region. This extremely rare and important discovery provides groundbreaking information on how Parasaurlophus grew up. This is just one of the countless examples of how Webb students have contributed to the field of paleontology.
caption: The exterior of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology located on The Webb Schools campus, Claremont, CA.
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