The UW Geological Museum is the recent recipient of a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or IMLS. The $101,413 grant will be put toward a project entitled The Cretaceous-Paleogene Fossil Mammal Project: Digitizing and sharing Wyoming’s rare fossil mammal collection for understanding mammal extinction and recovery through ecosystem collapse.
The IMLS made the announcement on their website.
“The University of Wyoming Geological Museum will complete the digitization of its fossil mammal collection which spans the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-PG) mass extinction. The project will support the creation of 15,000 research-quality images of 5,000 rare mammal specimens from the collection.”
The fossils are photographed with Keyence Digitation purchased by Coe Library. Each fossil will be photographed three different times to allow for the viewing of multiple angles. The Keyence enables researchers to view details that cannot be achieved with a standard camera. Researchers can focus-stack the images to provide a clearer image of these often times millimeter sized fossils.
Wyoming is home to a wide variety of mammal fossils from the K-PG period while other states are limited in their fossil variety. Wyoming’s historically depositional environment has allowed sediment to be deposited and not taken away. This along with mountain building tectonic activity and our state’s lack of vegetation has created an environment perfectly suited for fossil collecting.
The project will digitize the museum’s fossils from the cretaceous period, about 140 million years ago, to the oligocene, 25 million years ago. The museum currently holds around 41,000 fossils from this period, however, only 5,000 will be digitized. Dr. Laura Vietti is the head of the project. She explains how they prioritize some fossils over others.
“We’re going to hand-select specimens that best represent the taxon, as well as the time periods, as well as the location,” says Vietti.
A majority of the grant money will be used to fund two graduate assistants and two undergraduate assistants. One of these students, Shadow McKim, a junior studying biology, will be tasked with operating the Keyence and filing the fossils.
“I’m hoping to work for National Geographic or a museum,” says McKim.
She is expecting this grant will provide her with experience she can apply to her career path.
The project is working in conjunction with the Wyoming State Science Fair to make the files accessible in classrooms across the state.
Coe Library will take up the challenge of cataloguing the upwards of 45,000 files, as there are only around 100 current images of the collection. Chad Hutchens, the Head of Digital Collections at Coe Library, emphasizes the importance of mixing the geology department’s expertise with Coe Library’s ability to bring that expertise to the public.
“We’ll handle file transfer and upload and IT contracts for storage and the description information for each fossil,” Hutchens said.
Most of the fossils in the collection were found on public land in Wyoming, so the motivation of this project is to make the collection available to the public.
“I think one of the cool things about this is that people will actually be able to see what is in that backroom [of the Geological Museum]. Almost all of the things that we have done to date with Laura and the Geology Museum folks have been things that aren’t on display in the museum,” Hutchens said.
The images will be accessible through an online database for researchers through the UW Advanced Research Computing Center and eventually a more user-friendly website for the general public. The user-friendly website will likely be available in the fall 2018 semester at the earliest.
