Improvement of Curation of Vertebrate Paleontological Collection

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The fossil vertebrate collections of the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, are among the world's most important. These collections comprise more than 140,000 catalogued specimens, and they provide one of the most complete representations of the history of the North American vertebrate fauna available today. The University's Department of Paleontology has recently become part of a new Department of Integrative Biology, and the collections will be moved into renovated quarters in the Life Sciences Building, along with the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Combining the zoology and paleontology faculties, and juxtaposing the fossil and Recent vertebrate collections, will make the new department a center for the study of vertebrate evolution. Dr. William Clemens will oversee the transfer of the collections to new compactorized storage areas. Accessibility to specimens will be improved greatly, and the new quarters will support many years of continued collection growth. Collections of fossils are the libraries in which the history of life can be studied. Growth and improvement of these collections is vital to evolutionary studies, and to our understanding of the history of life on earth. The proposed collection improvement will benefit paleontologists, geologists, vertebrate zoologists, biogeographers, and evolutionary biologists around the world.