BRINGING FOSSIL LOCALITY DATA INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

The U-M Museum of Paleontology Invertebrate Paleontology collection is home to approximately 2 million fossil specimens. Of these, a smaller fraction (~15,000) have been published and figured in peer-reviewed literature. The collection team is working to digitize this type collection to be able to share the data with verified aggregators (e.g. iDigBio, GBIF). One step in this process is to georeference locality data to provide GPS coordinate data and link it to the specimen records. We use GEOLocate through our Specify database to identify coordinates and estimate uncertainty surrounding the location. We have generated maps in ArcGIS Online to determine the current ownership of the land the fossils were found on and document a collecting year to ensure proper permitting was acquired. As none of the data from the UMMP IP collection are currently available online, it is also important to consider the potential impact of sharing this seemingly ‘dark data’. As the project has progressed, we track information on taxonomy, geography, geologic time, and more to compare to information already available on data aggregators. The UMMP IP has great regional strengths and it is clear that the incorporation of our specimen records will fundamentally change the available information on species occurrences in the Michigan Basin and during the early Paleozoic.