Proposal to Complete the Re-housing and Renovation of the Invertebrate Paleontology Collections

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University houses one of the premier collections of invertebrate fossils in the US. Since its founding by Louis Agassiz in the 1850s, the collection has served as an important resource for researchers from the US and abroad, housing over 10,000 types and more than a million specimens. However, while the collection has not been neglected, neither has it been much improved over the course of the last century. It now falls below the standards that one might expect for a collection of its size and significance. The primary goals for modernization of the invertebrate fossil collection are to assemble together in high security cases the types and other valuable specimens now scattered throughout the collection; to add, replace, and renovate the housing for the remainder of the collection, including installation of compactors; and to computerize the collection into a fully searchable web-based database.