A CASE STUDY IN RAPID DIGITIZATION USING FOSSIL SEA SCORPIONS

Natural History Collections house biodiversity of life on Earth through geologic time. These global collections provide researchers, educators, students, and the general population with tangible available resources to better understand climate change, evolution, medicine, and general change through time. We provide a case study where we digitized a collection of Eurypterida from the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology and immediately employed them into a research study on morphological change. The eurypterid collection at the UMMP had not been extensively studied in at least 50 years, with the bulk of the collection was reposited in 1964 from the Bertie Waterlime Formation. Many specimens present fell under the same handful of collecting events from UMMP expeditions and had varying amounts of documentation with them. We collated information from card catalogs and accession records to digitize and gather all information into the database for a comprehensive specimen record. We inventoried the collection consisting of approximately 400 specimens and selected 130 with intact prosoma. Previous work (Bicknell & Amati 2021) outlined landmarks to assess prosoma shape and eye position and the UMMP collection could then be compared to these results. Each specimen was imaged and those that had intact prosoma were imaged more precisely for subsequent landmarking in the R StereoMorph package. This consisted of four fixed landmarks and two sets of sliding landmarks along curves of the prosoma. The data was analyzed using a Principal Components Analysis(PCA) and results were visualized in R before being compared to the previous work. Results indicate a large morphospace occupation from the genus Eurypterus, which supports previous studies. Rapid digitization of this historically understudied material promoted immediate research possibilities, collaboration across institutions, student engagement, and increased access to this previously inaccessible data.