This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project will computerize curatorial data, improve the physical storage and organization of specimens, and provide on-line availability of information for Indiana University's Paleontological Collection and its William R. Adams Zooarchaeology Collection. These collections document evidence of the past history of life, provide comparative materials for identifying fossil and archaeological remains, and house type specimens that embody more than 1,000 taxonomic names. In total, there are an estimated 250,000 specimens in the collections. The project will better preserve recent skeletal material belonging to endangered species, better secure fossil type specimens, and better serve the research needs of the scientific community.
This project will serve the global scientific community by improving access to an invaluable research. The project will provide hands-on education of graduate and undergraduate students in the care, preservation, identification, and interpretation of the remains of animals, both living and extinct. It will also provide opportunities for multidisciplinary faculty, graduate and undergraduate research projects. Finally, the project will better educate students and the general public about the contribution of zooarchaeology and paleontology to knowledge about biodiversity, climate change, evolution, and the history of the earth's biota, including humans. Data from the project will be available at www.indiana.edu/~palcoll/ and www.indiana.edu/~zooarch/
