Digitization PEN: Increasing the Robustness of the Ordovician and Pennsylvanian Dataset of PALEONICHES-TCN

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Invertebrate fossil collections hold millions of specimens that record the history of diversity and evolution of life on earth. Over 123,000 historically important specimens in the Yale Peabody Museum (YPM) will be recorded in a database with identification, geologic age, and the location of where the fossils were collected. The database, combined with similar databases from collaborating museums and those involved with the Paleoniches Thematic Collections Network, will show where animals lived over the course of hundreds of million years and help us understand how long-term climate change affected their distribution over time. YPM will hold a workshop to teach other professionals how to database fossil collection locations through creation of an integrated data management infrastructure that allows researchers to view the objects on a map and analyze data. Those maps, along with information about some of the most important fossils, will become part of a multimedia educational cart for use in public exhibition areas. This project will rely on employment of undergraduate student workers who will gain experience in scientific and museum collections research. It will also provide internships for two students in the YPM EVOLUTIONS program (NSF GEO1108086: Track 1: GEOPATH: Geoscience Educational Opportunities Promoting Advancement to Higher Education), an afterschool program for underserved high school students from the New Haven, CT region. This award is made as part of the National Resource for Digitization of Biological Collections through the Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections program and all data resulting from this award will be available through the national resource (iDigBio.org).