Conservation of the Princeton Collection and Oversize Fossils at the Yale Peabody Museum

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Conservation of the Princeton Collection and oversize fossils at the Yale Peabody Museum A grant has been awarded to Yale University under the direction of Jacques Gauthier to conserve fossils in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History's (YPM) Princeton (PU) Collection, to conserve very large (oversized) YPM specimens, and to enhance databases associated with these parts of the collection. This grant will enable the Division to raise the curatorial standards of the collections and make them more accessible to researchers, staff, students, and the world at large. Orphaned in 1985 when Princeton University abandoned its paleontology program, the 15,000 PU specimens have never been properly housed. Especially well known for its South American mammals collected in the late 1890's, the PU Collection holds representatives of nearly every major vertebrate clade, including hundreds of irreplaceable Holotypes. This project will repair broken specimens, line trays with polyethylene foam, build supports for specimens as needed, including 245 supports for oversized specimens -- thereby improving the physical conditions of the specimens and their housing. This project will also inventory the entire PU Collection, as well as all specimens receiving conservation treatment, providing detailed physical location and element descriptions for each specimen. The inventory component will, through the YPM website, diversify the kind of data available and support a new level of utility to the research community. The Yale Peabody Museum serves an increasingly diverse community, both within and outside the University. YPM collections serve as central foci for these services. Through outreach efforts -- in the form of behind-the-scenes tours, as well as public lectures, staff participation in YPM public events, and collaborative science-initiatives with the New Haven and surrounding public school districts -- the Vertebrate Paleontology Division has long been a linchpin in the Museum's efforts to educate and involve the public in both the current and historical scientific worlds. Yale has renewed its commitment to collecting, collections, and collections-based research, as demonstrated by the recent opening of a new facility for collections, teaching, and research, the Environmental Science Center. Only by proper conservation and continued care of museum collections can the information they hold be made fully available to the researchers, students, and general public of today, while being enhanced and preserved for future generations.