This project will assist in the curation of a large, unique, and irreplaceable collection of fossil marine invertebrates recently transferred to the museum by the U.S. Geological Survey. The most significant part of this collection is the Alaskan and Arctic material, which includes the only fossil specimens ever collected from many regions of Alaska. The Menlo Park Collection is currently stored in an off-campus site, in considerable disorder due to the haste with which the collection was transferred and moved to the University of California Museum of Paleontology. As a result, research access is very difficult. The project will provide staff to catalog the collection, for movers to bring the Alaska and Arctic material to campus and integrate it with the UCMP fossil invertebrate collections, and for additional casework to accommodate this material in the UCMP collection room. The remaining material, primarily from California, Oregon and Washington, will be cataloged and placed in order to make it accessible for scientific study, but will remain in an off-site storage facility due to space limitations on campus. This award will provide a complete physical reorganization of the collection, provide efficient and effective access to these unique specimens, provide a complete computer locality database of the collection, and increase the availability of collection data to the research community.
