In June, 1996, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)transferred a large collection of Tertiary coastal plain invertebrate fossils to the Virginia Museum of Natural History (VMNH). This collection (hereafter referred to as the USGS Collection) is vastly important, not only because of its large size, but because it contains samples and specimens from many localities that are no longer available. The USGS Collection provides doucementation of the richly fossiliferous mid-Atlantic states where construction and urban development have obliterated critical fossil localities. The biostratigraphy of this area has been the key to understanding the less well-exposed regions to the south and north and has become a national and international standard.
The USGS Collection is contained in 114 museum cases, usually termed "Smithsonian, or S.I., cases." These cases vary in age from 30 to 60 years old, have wooden frames covered with steel sheeting and all-wood drawers. The collections consist primarily of Tertiary mollusks, but being stratigraphic sets, they also contain representatives of most other invertebrate taxa (i.e., crustaceans, echinoids, corals, bryozoans, microfossils) and some vertebrate material. The fossils are housed in chipboard trays and are in varying stages of curation, from unprocessed lithologic samples to cleaned, sorted, and identified sets. Information as to locality, stratum, age, and other pertinent data is available in a variety of forms such as field notebooks, guadrangle maps, slide and photograph archives, and an extensive set of lithologic, micropaleontologic, ecologic, and voucher samples. The USGS Collection covers the Tertiary Coastal Plain portions of most of the states from Massachusetts to Mississippi, with Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina being the most completely collected areas. These latter areas are the most important to the VMNH. The Collection has been documented in numerous professional papers, memoirs, bulletins, and journals by curators, geologists, and graduate students.
This project will support the rehousing of the USGS Collection in state-of-the-art all-metal cabinets. The contents will be entirely inventoried, the original stratigraphic order will be reestablished and a working biologic set will be extracted from the available large collections. The project will make over a million fossil specimens from 13 different states available to schools and universites in an area where there are no large museum collections. It will provide a series of collections that preserve their biodiversity, and hence, are critical to ecologic, extinction, and climate studies.
