PRESERVATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF PALEONTOLOGY COLLECTIONS FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION

Fossil and mineral specimens housed at Indiana University's Department of Geological Sciences comprise a rich and scientifically valuable history of the university's past, and are of greater importance for the future role of multidisciplinary research and educational ventures. Collected initially by David Dale Owen, first State Geologist of Indiana (1839) and leader of several US geological surveys of the Mississippi Basin, the core collection dating from 1852 has grown to more than 600 primary type fossil specimens and 2200 specimens referred to in the published literature. To effectively manage, use, and mine the data from this collection of fossil specimens, we transferred original handwritten notes containing temporal and geographic data for each of 7000 specimens into a database provided as a webservice with visual interaction. This service was developed using Microsoft Virtual Earth, AJAX, and ASP .NET 2.0. The Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services that combines different 2D and 3D imagery mapping, location, and search abilities. Additionally, by using AJAX and clustering techniques, the tool efficiently provides the user with the ability to view and interrogate the data in a rich capacity that was previously unavailable. The addition of modern geographic coordinates and a data warehouse schema allowed for production of maps that identified, for the first time in the history of the collection, the spatial and temporal distribution of specimens in the collection. The material catalogued so far come from 32 US states and six other countries, most from Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and Alabama. Our ultimate goals are to use data mining algorithms to find correlations among taxa, ages, lithologies, and geography to identify biostratigraphic, biogeographic, and ecological associations that were not identified by the original studies of the individual faunas. Though small compared to some, the IU collection and others like it are invaluable because they contain the original fossil material used to characterize regional rock and time units, because they provide reference material for future biostratigraphic and paleoecological analysis, and because they provide hands-on resources for training future paleontologists.