Fossil Insects and Amber Fossils at the American Museum of Natural History: Preparation, Curation, and Conservation

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The Department of Entomology at the American Museum of Natural History houses 13,500 specimens of fossil insects, including 624 types. The main strengths are fossils in amber, Cretaceous fossils, and sizeable historical collection of insects in Oligocene shales from Florissant, Colorado, that has received virtually no curation for 80 years. This proposal seeks to complete preparation and cataloguing of several thousand amber and compression fossil specimens; to identify approximately 2000 specimens; to house the compression fossils in new drawers; to prepare all types and other important amber specimens for long-term conservation; and to create high-resolution Computed Tomography images of selected specimens. In addition, the project will investigate new technology such as High-Resolution Soft-Xray imaging as a means to generate data from damaged and degraded amber sources.