CSBR: Natural History Collections: Unlocking the Fossil Cabinet: Improving Conservation and Accessibility of Invertebrate Paleontology Collections at the Natural History Museum of

Los Angeles County Museum Of Natural History Foundation, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

An award is made to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) that will support the curation, digitization, and accessibility of specimens and data held in the Invertebrate Paleontology Collection (LACMIP), with three distinct and essential ojbectives. First, historic collections of Pliocene-Pleistocene age fossils require extensive physical curation in order to be incorporated into an ongoing cataloguing and imaging initiative. Second, extensive collections of Cretaceous fossils from California will be properly curated and digitized for the first time. Third, within these holdings is an important private collection of Cretaceous and Miocene age fossils acquired by LACMIP, which will be curated and made accessible to researchers. Once properly housed, catalogued and photographed, all three collections will provide critical reference specimens for understanding past climatic, biogeographic, and environmental changes in the Western United States. The project will also allow continued growth of a program that provides hands-on training of student interns from nearby under-served universities and community colleges and STEM educators from local schools. Ultimately, the physical curation of more than 1.2 million specimens are improved, and the addition of 156,000 specimen records and 1,300 images will make the collections more accessible and useful for research. The collections that will benefit from this award span much of the last 90 million years of geological history, environmental change, and evolution in California, and include representatives of most major invertebrate groups. This award will secure the future of these collections, increase their physical and digital accessibility, and for the first time, make them publically available for teaching, research, and outreach. More than 1.1 million Pliocene-Pleistocene fossils collected during the 1870s-1930s will be moved to archival trays and vials to permit their digitization. Nearly 126,000 Cretaceous fossils collected from California over the last 80 years will undergo substantial curatorial improvement, including rehousing, cataloguing, and digital imaging. A collection of some 30,000 specimens and associated stratigraphic data assembled from local Miocene and Cretaceous rocks will be unpacked and made accessible in new cabinets, housed in archival materials, and digitized. All data resulting from digitization of these collections will be archived in KE-EMu, a collections management system that integrates all of the NHM's biological, historical, and anthropological collections. Specimen records and digital images will also be fully integrated into existing data networks (e.g., iDigBio, GBIF, and the PBDB). The project will make these significant collections readily available to the public, thus providing a stimulus for research and resources for education. The resulting data will substantially increase accessible information about Cretaceous, Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene invertebrate biodiversity of the Eastern Pacific. Such data fills an existing gap, and will be of broad research value to paleontologists and malacologists in studies of environmental and climatic change, biogeography and paleoecology, and for systematic and molecular biologists. Specimen records and images will be discoverable from the LACMIP on-line portal (collections.nhm.org) and the national resource for Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (www.idigbio.org).