ROGER KAESLER'S CONTRIBUTION AS A CURATOR: HIS VIEW OF MUSEUM COLLECTIONS AND THEIR IMPORTANCE TO PALEONTOLOGY

Among Roger Kaesler's many contributions to paleontology, his role as a Curator should not be overlooked. Roger's 40 plus years as a Curator have given him great insight on the importance of museum collections to paleontology. He has come to fully understand how the level of curation and incompleteness of museum collections affect their usefulness in paleontological studies. Through his work with students and colleagues he has made great strides to show that despite all their problems, museum collections hold important information that can be used to answer research questions in systematics, biostratigraphy, macroevolution, and paleoecology. Museum collections are not mere gravel. The information they hold along with the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology provide a wealth of knowledge for today's paleontologists and leave an important databank of information for future paleontologists.