Computerization of the Type Specimen Collection of the Paleontological Research Institution

Paleontological Research Institute, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

A grant has been awarded to the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) under the direction of Dr. Warren Allmon for partial support of computerizing and putting on-line records of the most important portion of the PRI collections, the 13,600 "type" specimens (those which have been published in the scientific literature as representative of particular named species and subspecies). Although the PRI Type Collection is but a small fraction of the Institution's total collection, which includes more than 2 million specimens, the types are the scientifically extremely important because researchers use them to represent named species and compare with other forms. The information that results is of basic value for biostratigraphy (using fossils to date rocks) and systematics (the study of the evolution and diversity of life). The award will be used by PRI to enter information and images from these 13,600 specimens into a database, and to make images and information available on a new website. The major scientific results of this work will be to make an important part of the PRI collection, which is among the 10 largest invertebrate paleontology collections in the US, available to the global research community. This will be relevant to a wide diversity of geological and biological research projects, and particularly to at least two areas of active and controversial paleobiolgical research to which PRI's collections are most applicable: 1) the connection between environmental change in marine ecosystems of the Western Atlantic over the past 65 million years; and 2) the patterns of evolutionary change among marine invertebrates in New York during the Devonian period (ca. 400-360 million years ago). The project will also provide for the "repatriation" of data to non-US countries from which many PRI specimens were collected, including Cuba, Trinidad, and Venezuela. By laying the groundwork for subsequent phases of computerization of other portions of the PRI collections, this project will begin the long-term process of making the entire collection much more widely available to K-12 students, students at nearby Cornell University and other colleges and universities, and the general public than has been possible before.