A SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION AND NATIONAL PARK SERVICE COLLABORATION TO MANAGE PALEONTOLOGICAL RESOURCES

Prior to the establishment of several national parks in the United States, the Smithsonian Institution made collections of fossil specimens from lands later protected by the National Park Service. The National Park Service had not previously inventoried many of these specimens within the Smithsonian collections. In 2012, the Smithsonian Institution and the National Park Service initiated a collaborative project to inventory specimens collected from four localities within current or previous units of the National Park System: Charles Gilmore’s Paleozoic vertebrate ichnofossils from Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona; Remington Kellogg’s Pleistocene vertebrate fossils and coprolites from Rampart Cave, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona; Lester Ward’s cycads from Fossil Cycad National Monument, South Dakota (now abolished), and Lloyd Logan’s Pleistocene vertebrate fossils from Musk Ox Cave, Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico. Each specimen was inventoried and photographed, and any associated original documentation including historical photographs were scanned. The information collected is being used to support research, resource management and curation at the respective parks. The amount of specimens inventoried represents only a small percentage of the NPS collections maintained by the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. The collections management staff in the Department of Paleobiology have created a map using ArcGIS to identify the location of these collections along with metadata on the specific objects. This experimental work in progress will hopefully lead to the creation of similar maps for all of the department’s paleontological resources.