In April 2010 Allen Marquette, the Community Education Program Coordinator for the Prince William Sound Science Center traveled via ferry from Cordova, Alaska to Valdez, Alaska with his crate full of skulls, bones, and teeth in preparation for his lectures in Valdez. These artifacts helped demonstrate Allen's interests in the plants, animals, and climate of Alaska during the Pleistocene epoch.
Allen spent the morning of 23 April at the Hermon Hutchens Elementary School talking with the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders about the plants and animals of Pleistocene Alaska. During their lunch, Allen met with 1st through 3rd graders to talk about the animals that roamed Alaska during the same epoch.
In the afternoon Allen went to the George H. Gilson Junior High School Life Science 7th grade class to discuss some of the more unique adaptations, animal behaviors and relationships that Ice Age animals had during the Pleistocene Epoch.
Allen also had the opportunity to speak to the general public at the Maxine and Jesse Whitney Museum. The Maxine and Jesse Whitney Museum contains one of the largest collections of Native Alaskan art and artifacts in the world. The collection was donated by Ms. Whitney to Prince William Sound Community College in 1998. Please see below for the advertisement for the lecture being held at the museum:
2.5 million to 12,000 years ago strange creatures roamed this land – huge and powerful beasts with amazing adaptations. Glaciers and permafrost still dominated much of the land. What was Alaska like then? Steppe horses roamed North America, as did giant ground sloths, woolly mammoths, mastodons and bears standing twice as large as the coastal brown bears of modern day Alaska! Come learn more about them. See and touch actual fossils and reproductions.
Allen Marquette has been the Community Education Program Coordinator for the Prince William Sound Science Center for the last seven years. This includes managing a Discovery Room program set up for K-6 graders. He also runs a community education program that provides science lectures to the community of Cordova on a weekly basis. He states, "I love science and the ability to share my passion with others... To share the wow factor in science... Especially with kids!"