The University of Alaska Museum (UAM) Earth Sciences Collection in Fairbanks includes over 60,000 fossil specimens, including the largest collection of polar dinosaurs in the world and the second largest collection of Ice Age mammals from Alaska. This irreplaceable resource has tripled in size in the last 30 years, and much of the collection is improperly housed and overcrowded, and access to specimen data is severely limited. This NSF-sponsored project will provide funding for critical upgrades to the collection. UAM will purchase much-needed mobile storage shelving and reorganize and properly house the collection for the first time. Importantly, the entire fossil vertebrate collection will be electronically data-based, bar-coded, and photographed.
UAM is the major natural history museum for a region encompassing an area one-fifth the size of the contiguous United States. The specimen data captured during this project will be made freely accessible to the public, researchers, and land managers via the Internet, making it one of the best-documented paleontology collections in the nation. This project will enhance scientific research in Alaska, provide valuable training and employment for graduate and undergraduate science students and help to spotlight Alaskan fossils to UAM's 90,000 annual visitors.
The University of Alaska Museum (UAM) Earth Sciences Collection in Fairbanks is the primary repository for fossils in State of Alaska. UAM houses the largest collection of polar dinosaurs in the world and one of the major collections of Alaskan Ice Age mammals. The collection has a long history dating back to the 1920s and contains many important fossils, but most of the material had been improperly stored and was not adequately curated. As a result the specimens are at risk of damage and many of the fossils were largely inaccessible to researchers studying the material. Also problematic is that the collection had not been catalogued in a modern computerized database, making it further difficult for researchers to access critical data about the specimens for study. The major goals of this project were to: 1) provide critical new mobile shelving units to house the fossils in the Earth Sciences Collection, and to 2) catalogue all of the fossil vertebrates in a computerized database and photograph these fossil so that the collection data can be widely available to researchers and the public on the Internet via our online, multi-collection database, Arctos. We installed new mobile shelving units in the collection area that provided, for the first time, space to properly house our fossil vertebrate collection. This allowed us to more efficiently use the available space, reduce overcrowding, and safely and easily access the fossils for study. We also catalogued our entire fossil vertebrate collection into our state-of-the-art computerized database, Arctos. We entered critical data for every specimen (location, identity, collector, etc…) and also barcoded each fossil as a convenient way to connect the specimen with its associated information in the database. We also photographed the specimens (most at multiple different angles) to help researchers who are not able to easily visit our collection. In total, we catalogued 20,434 specimens, approximately one third of the entire collection but including all of the fossil vertebrates and some of the fossil invertebrate and plant collection as well. We also took over 42,000 images of the collection and greatly improved data quality for each specimen (improved identifications, better locality coordinates, etc…). All of these data are freely available online for use by the public, researchers and government agencies who manage publically-owned fossils housed in our collection. The project was a valuable training and employment opportunity for two graduate and five undergraduate students who learned modern museum curatorial methods and gained experience working in an active museum research laboratory.
