Digitization PEN: Expanding and enhancing a TCN digitizing fossils to reconstruct evolving ecosystems the Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway

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The Sam Noble Museum (SNM) of the University of Oklahoma will join a Thematic Collections Network (TCN) of ten other institutions with extensive holdings of fossils from rocks that formed in a shallow sea, termed the Western Interior Seaway, which bisected North America during the late Cretaceous Period (65-100 million years ago). The late Cretaceous was a time of warmer, "greenhouse" climates and higher sea levels than those of today, and environments may have been similar to those predicted for the middle of the next century under some scenarios of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The data made available through this TCN offer an opportunity to answer a variety of questions dealing with the impact of climatic and sea level change on marine communities, and may provide critical information for predicting future outcomes for modern marine biodiversity. This project will digitize collection data from the SNM and make them accessible to the scientific community, industry, K-16 educators and students, and the public via a variety of web portals. Additional societal impacts of the project are made through a collaboration with the Education Department at the SNM, which will develop a field- and lab-based teacher workshop and web resources, and produce curricula that focus on biotic and environmental change over time, including sea level change, continental drift and other geological phenomena. The project also contributes to training of university students in modern digitization techniques and the generation of biodiversity data from museum collections, with up to five students participating annually.The Invertebrate Paleontology Collection at the SNM will digitize data for about 13,000 specimens from 450 localities at the northern and southern ends of the seaway, and thereby expand both the paleogeographic and paleoenvironmental reach of the project. Of particular importance are localities from the far northern margin of the seaway in Alaska and northwestern Canada that extend geographic coverage of the project by at least 4,000 km. They will allow the geographic ranges of species to be assessed fully, and will also provide insight into latitudinal variability in paleocommunity composition. The SNM?s holdings also include about 7,500 specimens from 240 localities in southern Oklahoma. They record paleocommunities in coastal regions of the seaway that lie shoreward of localities in Texas that will be contributed by other partners in the project. These data "fill in" the more proximal end of a shallow marine environmental gradient near the southern margin of the seaway, thereby expanding the scope of the project into onshore environments. Data will be aggregated by the TCN and shared with iDigBio (www.idigbio.org).