INCREASING THE RESEARCH POTENTIAL OF DIGITIZED FOSSILS: A PILOT STUDY USING SPECIFY TO ATTACH STABLE ISOTOPE DATA TO VOUCHERED MUSEUM SPECIMENS

With the advent of stable isotope studies of fossil vertebrates over the past several decades, tens of thousands of measurements (e.g., δ¹³C, δ¹⁸O) have been sampled from vouchered museum specimens in research collections throughout the U.S. The problem with these data, however, is that they typically reside in the researchers’ unpublished data files, published papers, or supplementary data. Until now there has been no systematic or coordinated attempt to attach these data to the fossil specimens from which they were sampled. With recent initiatives to digitize museum specimens, this disconnect can change. By storing isotopic data in digitized specimen databases, the information is automatically linked to sortable taxonomic, stratigraphic, chronologic, and geographic information. Although only a small subset of the overall wealth of stable isotope data in the research domain, those from vouchered specimens have immense potential to enhance our understanding of paleoecology and paleoclimates in ancient ecosystems.

Here we describe a pilot study that provides a shell developed within the Specify database platform to attach stable isotope data to several thousand specimens in the Vertebrate Paleontology collections at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Legacy data entry has just started, and in addition, we also plan to systematically capture newly published analyses within our digitized fossil collections. Challenges still remain before the research value can be realized including: the development of metadata standards (e.g., Darwin Core); and integration of specimen data on an aggregated cloud platform that would allow queries from multiple collections at different institutions. We also plan to develop best practices with a view towards broadening the research capacity of digitized fossil collections that have been analyzed for stable isotopes.