Extinct West Indian Vertebrates on the World Wide Web: a Digital Museum for Geoscience Conservation, Education and Research

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ABSTRACTExtinct West Indian Vertebrates on the World Wide Web: A Digital Museum for Geoscience Conservation, Education and ResearchThis is a pilot project, focusing on the extinct vertebrates of Puerto Rico. The project assembles and disseminates interactive, digital library of late Quaternary extinct vertebrates from the West Indies, an expansion of a decade-long research and education program. The late Quaternary history of West Indian vertebrates, especially mammals, is of special interest because it is dominated by a wave of extinctions unprecedented elsewhere. West Indian Quaternary vertebrate fossils are preserved almost exclusively in caves. High human population densities in the Caribbean are significantly impacting caves, with the irreplaceable loss of both paleontological and paleoclimatic evidence. The survival and elucidation of the paleoecological and paleoclimatic archive in West Indian caves depends on a collaboration of local scientists, amateur natural historians, cavers and informed members of the general public. Participation by these diverse interest groups is severely limited by a lack of access to comparative materials, which for practical and historic reasons have generally been accessioned into the collections of the major museums in the United States. This project makes these materials widely available in digital form, via both the World-Wide-Web and distribution on CD-ROM Methods.