CSBR: Natural History Collections: Critical renovation and revitalization of the University of Iowa Fossil Plant Collection

University Of Iowa, Iowa City IA

Investigators

Abstract

Fossils tell us about life on Earth over the past 3.5 billion years, but they can also help us predict what will happen to life in the future, as the Earth's environment continues to change. Museums hold millions of fossils used by researchers worldwide. Each individual collection of fossils, regardless of its size, is a vital piece of evidence, providing it is well maintained and documented. The fossil plant collection at the University of Iowa Paleontology Repository (UIPR) is no exception. Since 2005, scattered individual faculty research collections have been transferred from the UI Biology Department as faculty retire. These collections are now consolidated as a single unit under UIPR care. To preserve this new collection, specimens will be organized in museum-grade cabinets in storage media designed to mitigate deterioration, risks from pests, and high and/or fluctuating humidity. To make the collection accessible for research and education, specimen identifications will be verified and updated, specimens will be cataloged and photographed, and the digitized information made available on-line. Earth and Environmental Science undergraduate students, Museum Studies interns, and McNair Scholars will receive training in collection management and will investigate new techniques for determining the locality from which specimens were collected. All training efforts will target students from groups underrepresented in STEM. Trainees will participate in sharing data on-line and will present papers at conferences under the mentorship of project staff. They will also participate in the outreach activities by assisting with the development of educational resources, based on the collection, to engage K-12 students and the public. The specimens targeted by this project are currently stored in far from ideal conditions and, in the case of humidity-sensitive fossils, are actively deteriorating with pyrite disease. To halt this loss of scientific evidence and enable research access of this unique and irreplaceable material, the collection will be secured and rejuvenated by physical preservation in new museum storage according to modern standards and best practices, catalogued in the UIPR's Specify Collections Database, and digitized (high resolution photography). Data will be shared with on-line resources through initiatives such as iDigBio, the Paleobiology Database, GBIF, and the Iowa Digital Library. In the process of securing and preserving the collection, two research studies aimed at improving curatorial and management practices will be conducted. We will develop and test new curation methods for the care of pyritized material and coal ball acetate peels. In addition, we will investigate the geochemical "fingerprinting" of unprovenanced coal balls. The results of these studies will inform strategies used by the paleobotanical community. Much of the collection has been inaccessible to research since the 1980s. However, through this project collections will be made accessible to researchers and educators, including Sternberg's Cretaceous Dakota Formation Collection, critical to understanding the early evolution of angiosperms and their role in the changing structure of terrestrial ecosystems; Midwest coal ball collections, providing a unique record of Pennsylvanian floras critical for paleoecological reconstructions of ancient mire forests and fueling a rich array of phylogenetic hypotheses; the Pella Collection, a Pennsylvanian compression flora of significant research value due to its biogeographic, stratigraphic and lithographic context; and Macbride's 1893 Cretaceous Cycadeoid Collection, from the famous Minnekahta site, South Dakota. More information about the collection and its outreach program is available at http://geoscience.clas.uiowa.edu/paleo/.