About Bob "Bosco" Boscarelli — Marine, Geologist, Fossil Excavator
I’m Robert “Bosco” Boscarelli — paleontologist, geologist, seismologist, field researcher — 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. I’ve kept this site, in one form or another, since May 28, 1994.
Roots
It started with an encyclopedia. I was born in New London, Connecticut and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and somewhere around age ten I opened a family volume to the paleontology entry and never looked back — hooked on dinosaurs and the deep past. I went to Cathedral Latin High School in Cleveland, but that early pull toward deep time set the course for everything that followed.
Service and schooling
The passion went on hold while I served in the U.S. Marine Corps, working in avionics. Afterward I took a deliberately interdisciplinary path through school: an A.A. in Anthropology from Edison Community College (Fort Myers, FL, 1974); the study of geology at the University of Florida, including the 1979 UF field school — a long traverse across the American Southwest, reading the rock record from the Gulf Coast to the Great Plains (I still have the notebooks); a B.B.A. from National University (San José, CA, 1990); and an M.S. in eCommerce from National University (2000). Natural science, social science, and technology — that mix is exactly how I document, archive, and share this work.
Working life
I spent my career 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.
The field years
When I finally made it to the fossil beds of Wyoming and the badlands of the American West, the ten-year-old with the encyclopedia had found his way back. 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 Shell, Wyoming digs: the Sarah/Sophie Stegosaurus in 2004 — now on display at the Natural History Museum in London — and an exceptional, more-than-90%-complete Camarasaurus in 2007, now at the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan. Both Shell digs were run by Bob Simon; I excavated and documented.
Along the way I’ve been lucky to learn from and work beside some of the field’s most legendary figures — Dr. Robert Bakker, who rewrote how we understand dinosaur behavior; Dr. Paul Sereno, whose fossil discoveries span six continents; and Peter Larson of the Black Hills Institute, the man who excavated Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found — as well as Don Pfister and Kirby Siber.
Marine science
For a time I served as a docent and aquarist at the Seymour Center at Long Marine Lab, UC Santa Cruz — home of Ms. Blue, an 87-foot blue whale skeleton, one of the largest ever recovered. The work deepened my commitment to natural-history education and public science outreach.
Now
I live in Soquel, California, where I keep an eye on the living earth as well as the fossil one — a home seismic station (an EQ-1 in the basement feeding jAmaSeis, plus an indoor geophone) watching the San Andreas and Calaveras faults, and a weather station with more than twenty years of local records.
This site is where I’m bringing it all together — not to impress, but to preserve. A field journal and an archive, kept honest, meant to outlast me.
Where to go from here: the Wyoming excavations → · the live seismograph → · the photo archive → · get in touch →