Support for the Field Museum Fossil Invertebrate Collection

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The Field Museum's Fossil Invertebrate Collection is recognized internationally for its vast size and ongoing significance to research in systematics, evolution, and paleoecology. The collection includes about 320,000 specimen lots with as many as 2 million individual specimens. However, specimen overcrowding has hampered efforts to realize the full potential of the collection. Implementation of the project outlined in this proposal will result in a better organized, less crowded, and more easily accessible collection. The project will successfully address conservation issues, first by curating much of our backlog holdings, and second by alleviating crowding of specimens. The taxonomic division of this material and the integration of specimens into a temporal/systematic framework is viewed as the most practical and scientifically beneficial manner in which to treat it. This project outlines the reorganization and move of the entire collection, and additional primary curation by staff and visiting curators for type specimens, echinoderms and Paleozoic gastropods. The recent move of paleobotanical collections to new facilities has provided additional cabinet space more than sufficient for this need. The curation and incorporation of the backlog material in collections will result in effectively "new" specimens becoming available to the scientific community.