Wayne Thompson:  

I was born and have lived in Santa Cruz, CA, for the past 50 years except for 15 years spent in Humboldt County and a few short years in the bay area. My passions are teaching, learning, local natural history, especially geology and paleontology, biology, & mammology. I grew up in a castle in a forest of trees grafted by Axel Erlandson and dinosaurs in Scotts Valley. My mom & dad built the Lost World park around Axel's Tree Circus but my father died of cancer just prior to the park's opening. So I grew up in a pretty unusual environment; with the dinosaurs, enchanting trees, and cave kids as my friends, and to top it all off we lived in the castle with an animatronic life-sized T. rex on top surrounded by a turret I attended Vine Hill Elementary, Scotts Valley Elementary, and Baymonte Christian Elementary schools in Scotts Valley from 1967-1975 None of them could put up with me, so I went on to Soquel High. After graduating from Soquel I spent three years at Cabrillo College earning my AA degree. From there I went to U.C. Berkeley, where I majored in, you guessed it, paleontology. I spent four years working for the U.S. Department of the Interior, Geological Survey Menlo Park, doing research on human evolution in eastern Africa and oil reserve research on north slope of Alaska. I decided I'd had enough of that and returned to academia. I enrolled in U.C. Santa Cruz and worked toward my master's in Biology for a year, but changed cour...Expand for more