THE MONMOUTH AMATEUR PALEONTOLOGISTS’ SOCIETY: 46 YEARS OF COLLABORATION BETWEEN AVOCATIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL PALEONTOLOGISTS

The Monmouth Amateur Paleontologists’ Society (MAPS) was founded in 1969 by a small group of enthusiastic fossils collectors led by Ralph O. Johnson. The original group, of approximately 7 members, decided early-on to concentrate on collecting Late Cretaceous age fossils from New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. A small collection, began as an aid to help local collectors identify their fossils, has grown over the years into the MAPS Museum, a full-blown research/reference collection of over 25,000 specimens of both invertebrate and vertebrate fossils, from over 65 localities, with an emphasis on fossil cephalopods.

Over the years MAPS members have included purely avocational collectors, professional geologists and paleontologists, university professors, students and museum professionals. The MAPS collection is open to any and all interested students and researchers and is a widely recognized repository for Late Cretaceous fossils from the Atlantic Coastal Plane (ACP). Ralph Johnson is the co-author of at least 18 scientific journal papers and conference presentations and the MAPS collection has been cited in at least 30 other books and papers on the Late Cretaceous fossils of the ACP. It is especially noteworthy that, in its concentration on Late Cretaceous cephalopods, the collection has had a major impact on the understanding of the abundance, range and diversity of Late Cretaceous ammonites from eastern North America. When MAPS was in its infancy there were only about 8 species of ammonite listed from the ACP. Today, largely due to the work of MAPS, there are approximately 80 ammonite species recognized from the area. This has had huge implications with regards to refining zonation, age relationships and correlation of the Late Cretaceous ACP to the Gulf Coast, Western Interior and Europe.

In 2013 the Paleontological Research Institute awarded Ralph Johnson the Katherine Palmer Award for excellence of his contributions, as an avocational paleontologist, to the field of paleontology. Ralph gracefully accepted the award for himself and for all of the current and past members on the Monmouth Amateur Paleontologists’ Society.