Computerization of the Type Specimen Collection of the Paleontological Research Institution

在Warren Allmon博士的指导下，古生物研究所（PRI）获得了一笔拨款，用于部分支持PRI收藏中最重要部分的计算机化和在线记录，即13,600个“类型”标本（那些已在科学文献中发表的代表特定命名物种和亚种的标本）。虽然PRI类型收集只是该机构总收集的一小部分，其中包括200多万个标本，但这些类型在科学上极其重要，因为研究人员用它们来代表已命名的物种，并与其他形式进行比较。所得信息对生物地层学（用化石测定岩石年代）和系统学（研究生命的进化和多样性）具有基本价值。PRI将使用该奖项从这13600个标本中输入信息和图像到数据库中，并将图像和信息提供给一个新的网站。这项工作的主要科学成果将成为PRI收藏的重要组成部分，该收藏是美国十大无脊椎古生物学收藏之一，可供全球研究界使用。这将与广泛的地质和生物研究项目相关，特别是至少两个活跃和有争议的古生物研究领域，PRI的收集最适用：1)过去6500万年西大西洋海洋生态系统环境变化之间的联系；2)泥盆纪时期（约4 - 3.6亿年前）纽约海洋无脊椎动物的进化变化模式。该项目还将提供将数据“遣返”到美国以外的国家，这些国家收集了许多PRI标本，包括古巴、特立尼达和委内瑞拉。通过为PRI收藏的其他部分的后续计算机化阶段奠定基础，该项目将开始一个长期的过程，使整个收藏更广泛地提供给K-12学生，附近康奈尔大学和其他学院和大学的学生，以及普通公众，而这是以前可能的。

A grant has been awarded to the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) under the direction of Dr. Warren Allmon for partial support of computerizing and putting on-line records of the most important portion of the PRI collections, the 13,600 "type" specimens (those which have been published in the scientific literature as representative of particular named species and subspecies). Although the PRI Type Collection is but a small fraction of the Institution's total collection, which includes more than 2 million specimens, the types are the scientifically extremely important because researchers use them to represent named species and compare with other forms. The information that results is of basic value for biostratigraphy (using fossils to date rocks) and systematics (the study of the evolution and diversity of life). The award will be used by PRI to enter information and images from these 13,600 specimens into a database, and to make images and information available on a new website. The major scientific results of this work will be to make an important part of the PRI collection, which is among the 10 largest invertebrate paleontology collections in the US, available to the global research community. This will be relevant to a wide diversity of geological and biological research projects, and particularly to at least two areas of active and controversial paleobiolgical research to which PRI's collections are most applicable: 1) the connection between environmental change in marine ecosystems of the Western Atlantic over the past 65 million years; and 2) the patterns of evolutionary change among marine invertebrates in New York during the Devonian period (ca. 400-360 million years ago). The project will also provide for the "repatriation" of data to non-US countries from which many PRI specimens were collected, including Cuba, Trinidad, and Venezuela. By laying the groundwork for subsequent phases of computerization of other portions of the PRI collections, this project will begin the long-term process of making the entire collection much more widely available to K-12 students, students at nearby Cornell University and other colleges and universities, and the general public than has been possible before.