PALEOECOLOGICAL AND PALEOENVIRONMENTAL IMPLICATIONS OF MICROFOSSIL SPECIMENS UTILIZING GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS (GIS)

For the past thirty years, the Pioneer Trails Regional Museum in Bowman, North Dakota, has been collecting and protecting fossils through the effort of a volunteer work force. They have accurately collected and re-collected annually from a number of sites including 46 microfaunal sites from the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of southwestern North Dakota. When these collections were made, the details of the ongoing collection of macrofauna, pollens and other plant material, microfauna, sedimentary specimens and associated information was only recorded in hard copy. These collections records have never been digitized or converted to any database. This has limited the museum’s ability to correlate the information in any way other than manually. Now, with the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), the ability to link information tables to points on a map has introduced a new future for these paper-based data collections. Using GIS, with its ability to generate detailed maps with associated data still being linked to all points, allows for more complex and in-depth scientific conclusions. New analyses can be made in a number of areas, including paleoenvironmental and paleoecological studies of this critical transition zone. This study analyzes the implications of the data available to date, but there is still much room for growth, as more data can be added to the maps using the GIS ability to add layers of data. These layers can include anything from pollen to sedimentary information, and can accommodate the information from many more microsites.