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The Cretaceous World: Difference between revisions
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''Principal Investigators (PIs)'': [mailto:swestrop@ou.edu Stephen Westrop] | ''Principal Investigators (PIs)'': [mailto:swestrop@ou.edu Stephen Westrop] | ||
=== The Cretaceous World: Connecting the Cretaceous Seas of North America === | |||
An award is made to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's (NHMLA) Invertebrate Paleontology collections to support their contribution to the Cretaceous World Digitization Thematic Collections Network (CW-TCN) funded by NSF's Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Program. The primary goal of this project, "Connecting the Cretaceous Seas" Partner to Existing Network (CSC-PEN), is to digitize fossil marine invertebrates and vertebrates from the Western Interior Seaway (central North America), California, and the northeastern Pacific (Oregon-Alaska). These efforts will make thousands of new specimen records digitally available online. Collectively, these data will compliment the CW-TCN by filling gaps in the existing dataset, broadening its geographic and taxonomic coverage, and making these otherwise difficult to access collections significantly more visible to the interested public and research community. This information will facilitate current research aiming to better understand an interval of Earth's history during which warmer climates and marine flooding prevailed across North America. Results of this project will be communicated to the public through museum events, K-12 classroom programming, ongoing partnerships with local avocational paleontologists, and Virtual Field Experiences being coordinated by NHMLA on behalf of the CW-TCN. | |||
Benefits to be derived from this award include digitization of more than 32,000 marine invertebrate specimens from underrepresented areas of the Western Interior Seaway and Northeastern Pacific, and an additional 2,700 marine vertebrate fossils from the Western Interior Seaway and California. Notably, the addition of specimens from the Northeastern Pacific will create a bridge between recently digitized NHMLA collections from the Late Cretaceous of California with the existing focus of the CW-TCN in central North America. Such an expansion will complement current CW-TCN datasets, permitting the comparison of paleoecological niche modeling analyses in various paleoceanographic settings and enabling biogeographic comparisons of diversity change, ecosystem structure, and environmental change during a critical interval of Earth's history. Digitization will also involve the selective imaging of more than 2,000 specimens and georeferencing of over 750 localities. Notably, this project will digitally mobilize fossil data that have never before been available to aggregators, and, in doing so, will expand the NHMLA's capacity to share collections data through additional staff training. Digitized data from this project will be shared with iDigBio (idigbio.org) and made accessible via this resource. | |||
''Project Sponsor:'' Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History Foundation [https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1902262&HistoricalAwards=false (NSF Award 1902262)] | |||
''Principal Investigators (PIs):'' [mailto:ahendy@nhm.org Austin Hendy] (PI), Samuel McLeod (co-PI), Lindsay Walker (co-PI) | |||