IDENTIFYING INOCERAMIDS WITH WILLIAM A. COBBAN'S USGS DIGITIZED PRIMER

Dr. William A. Cobban prepared lithologic and chronologic charts for the Upper Cretaceous Western Interior based on the biostratigraphy of Ammonites and Inoceramids from the USGS Paleontology Collections. A great challenge that current and future researchers face are species identifications of the many Inoceramids. Recently we recovered a teaching tool that Dr. Cobban prepared in order to teach himself Inoceramid identifications. Early in his career he created a large folio in which he pasted high resolution black and white photographs of each species with a notation of a USGS Denver Mesozoic fossil locality where the fossil was found. The photographs were taken on large format sheet film (5”x7”) with “portrait” cameras in the photo labs of the Branch of Paleontology and Stratigraphy in Washington, D.C. and Denver, Colorado by staff photographers.

We scanned each of the nineteen pages on a Umax Powerlook 2100XL scanner. The oversized folio pages necessitated four scans per page and electronically stitching them together to achieve full-page coverage. The 300 dpi tiff images were converted into Adobe Acrobat pdf files and joined into book form. The pdf files will be posted on the USGS National Paleontological Database website.