WORKFLOW AND PALEONTOLOGICAL PROJECTS AT THE ADVANCED PHOTON SOURCE SYNCHROTRON (CHICAGO, USA)

Paleontology projects are now more common in synchrotron sources all around the world than they were few years ago. This is mainly due to the presence of few paleontologists working as beamline scientists or "super users" in some of these institutions, but also to the realization of the paleontological community of the inmmense possibilities that synchrotron x-rays have for our field.

Despite being "free of charge" laboratories (based in a reviewed proposal system), many paleontologists are not still aware of the availability of these instruments for their science, so there is a misrepresentation/over-representation of many fields, as for paleoanthropology/amber.

For the last three years the Advanced Photon Source in Chicago has started a new program on paleontology, including work based mainly in microtomography, but also with focus on fluorescence microscopy, fluorescence microtomography, nanotomography and perspectives in diffraction tomography. During these years, a very specific workflow for the paleontological projects has been developed, to help the paleontologists to understand all the steps of the process, from proposal submission, beamtime allocation, visit to scan the fossils, processing of the data and segmentation/interpretation of the results. This has already started to yield results in form of long term collaborations, new projects and publications on different fields of paleontology, as well as the development of new techniques/adaptation of instruments to fit the needs of these very particular samples.