The Florida State Museum, located on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville, contains the largest collection of fossil invertebrates in the southeast. Most of these specimens were collected from highly fossiliferous strata that occur throughout the state. The remainder derive principally from sites around the Gulf and Atlantic Coastal Plain and the circum- Caribbean. The fossil invertebrates provide us with a unique opportunity to understand the environmental conditions which existed in this part of the world throughout the Cenozoic Era (last 65 million years of Earth history) and to appreciate the substantial biological changes which have occurred. Over the last decade, the collection has suffered without a curator or collection manager. Nevertheless, private donations of fossils continued to pour in while faculty and students at the University of Florida deposited considerable amounts of fossil materials from their research efforts. This combination of events resulted in a tremendous backlog of uncurated and uncatalogued specimens. Therefore, one of the most important tasks facing the newly hired staff of the invertebrate paleontology division is to reduce the large curatorial backlog. This project provides funds to attack this problem. The goals of the project involve substantially reducing the curation backlog by preparing and cataloguing several thousand of the most important specimen lots, computerizing the entire catalogued collection, and preparing an up-dated type catalogue and summary of holdings. Attainment of these goals will affect dramatically the significance of the collection and its value as a national research resource. Computerization will allow scientists to search and scan the data files quickly and to perform complex sorts for the information they desire. Publication of a type catalogue and summary of holdings will help familiarize the scientific community with the resources in the collection. When the contents and organization of the invertebrate paleontology collection are publicized, many more earth scientists will be able to take advantage of the extensive amount of unique material contained therein.
