About

I’m Robert “Bosco” Boscarelli, and this is my archive.

The tagline says it best: Terra Infirma — a soft spot on the hard rock of Reality. What’s gathered here is decades of fieldwork — the excavations, the specimens recovered, the people who made them possible, and the science that ties it all together.

Roots

It started with an encyclopedia. I was ten years old in Cleveland, Ohio, when a volume on prehistoric life got hold of me and never let go. I went to Cathedral Latin High School there, but that early pull toward deep time set the course for everything that followed.

Service and work

I served in the U.S. Marine Corps (avionics), and spent my working life as an engineer — including years at Xerox and a stretch as a director of web operations. That engineering habit of mind — systems, tolerances, documentation — is the same one I bring to a quarry and to this archive.

Geology

I studied geology at the University of Florida, and in the summer of 1979 I joined the UF field school — a long traverse across the American Southwest, reading the rock record in the field from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains. I still have the notebooks.

The field years

Between 1994 and 1997 I worked the Morrison Formation at Como Bluff, Wyoming, alongside Dr. Robert T. Bakker — prospecting, excavating, and recovering Apatosaurus material, including “Bertha.” Later came the Wyoming digs at Shell: the Sarah/Sophie Stegosaurus in 2004 and an exceptional Camarasaurus in 2007, both with Bob Simon. Along the way I’ve been lucky to learn from people like Don Pfister, Peter Larson, and Kirby Siber.

Now

I live in Soquel, California, where I keep an eye on the living earth as well as the fossil one — a backyard seismic station (an EQ-1 feeding jAmaSeis) watching the San Andreas and Calaveras faults, and a weather station with more than twenty years of local records. I’ve also spent time as a docent and aquarist at the Seymour Center on the Santa Cruz coast.

This site is the place I’m bringing it all together — not to impress, but to preserve. A field journal and an archive, kept honest, meant to outlast me.