California Reference Libraries

The brown bear (Ursus arctos) can be found in North America and northern areas of Eurasia. There are sixteen recognized subspecies of the brown bear. This is the most widely distributed species of bear in the world, although its range is shrinking. Its range includes the Alaska and a few other areas of the United States, areas of Russia, and Romania and other areas of the Carpathian region, as...

Pinnacles National Park is located in the state of California in the United States. The park is comprised of 26,606 acres of land that was once inhabited by Native American tribes including the Ohlone people. When Spanish explorers arrived in the area, they brought diseases that nearly wiped out all of the Ohlone people, leaving the area uninhabited until Anglo-Americans arrived in 1865. By the...

Sequoia National Park is located in the United States in the southern area of the Sierra Nevada. The park contains 404,063 acres of protected land that was once inhabited by the Western Mono Native American tribe. The best evidence of Native American inhabitants are the pictographs found on Potwisha and Hospital Rock and bedrock mortars, tools that were sued to crush acorns. When European...

The Redwood National and States Parks, also known as RNSP, are located along the northern coasts of California in the United States. RNSP is comprised of the Prairie Creek Redwoods State, Del Norte Coast, and Jedediah Smith State Parks, created in the 1920’s, and Redwood National Park, encompassing an area of 133,000 acres. These areas protect 45 percent of the red wood old growth forests...

Yosemite National Park is located in eastern California in the United States in the central area of Sierra Nevada, extending to the western slopes of the range. The park holds 761,268 acres of protected land. The area became very popular after Thomas Ayres, the artist who was responsible for much of the publicity of the area, and an entrepreneur named James Mason Hutchings visited in 1855....

Death Valley National Park is located in Nevada and California in the United States. Many tribes of nomadic Native Americans originally inhabited the area, like the Timbisha tribe that was present around 1,000 AD. It was discovered by American and European settlers who were searching for a shortcut to the gold mines in California. The valley was given its name by this group, despite the fact...

The California Mussel, Mytilus californianus, is a large and edible mussel, a marine bivalve mollusk belonging to the family Mytilidae. It is native to the west coast of North America, occurring from northern Mexico to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. California mussels are found in clusters, often in very large aggregations, on rocks in the upper intertidal zone on the open coast, where they...

Kings Canyon National Park is located in southern Sierra, Nevada. The park encompasses an area that was once General Grant National Park, which was established in 1890, in order to preserve a grove of giant sequoia trees. The area was known to European settlers in the mid-nineteenth century, but was not well-known until 1873, after John Muir visited and found the environment to be similar to...

Lodewijk van den Berg is a naturalized American chemical engineer born in the Netherlands whom was rather dedicated to crystal growth and also rode aboard as a payload specialist on the 1985 Space Shuttle Challenger mission. He was born in Sluiskil, Netherlands on March 24, 1932. He worked to get his Engineer’s degree in chemical engineering at the Delft University of Technology in...

David Walker was a United States Navy officer and a NASA astronaut. He was born David Mathieson Walker on May 20, 1944 in Columbus, Georgia and graduated from Eustis High School in Eustis, Florida in 1962. He then went on to attend the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1966. Upon graduation, he went through flight training in...