National Fossil Day 2014

I just looked at my calendar and realized that it was about time for National Fossil Day!
This year celebrates the Mesozoic ecosystems, and we have evidence of one of these right here in Connecticut! Head out to visit Dinosaur State Park in Rocky Hill!

It's Cephalopod Week!

Things are busy, so you won't hear too much from me, but it is Cephalopod Week!
Learn more about our nautiloid and coleoid friends from NPR's Science Friday.
Here's an extinct ammonoid for you from the Yale Peabody Museum:

Geolex gets a facelift

Nancy Stamm and the USGS have performed those of us who work in natural history collections a huge service by developing and maintaining the Geolex site. For those of you who don't know, this is a huge compilation of stratigraphic names from around the United States. It includes reference histories for units, preferred names, and updated names. You might be asking yourself how could it possibly get any better, right?
Well, it did. The new and improved Geolex interface is sleek and useful. Added benefits to the new version of the site include additional "Stratigraphic Resources." Here you'll find the old card files scanned and uploaded, pdfs of lexicons and stratigraphic revision papers, links to state surveys, an interactive geologic mapview, and an interactive topographic mapview.
My thanks to Nancy Stamm and her helpers at the USGS!

iDigBio's Push for Digitization

Some of you may have heard of a little group called iDigBio. It started a few years back with a big grant from NSF. It is working to help natural history collections around the United States (both university collections and museum collections) digitize their materials. I have worked with iDigBio on various projects over the last few years, and I wanted to extol their virtues here briefly.

iDigBio (which stands for Integrated Digitized Biocollections) has been the first group I know of that has really had the funding, the national scope, and the cooperation of many different institutions and groups to be able to bring together researchers and staff from all types of biological collections. iDigBio has hosted workshops on a variety of topics. They have put together working groups that have created documents to help guide other institutions as they begin (or continue) their digitization journey. If you haven't encountered iDigBio yet, take a minute to check it out: http://www.idigbio.org.
Consider this the first of a series of posts about different aspects of iDigBio, and what it is doing to help our country's museums, university collections, researchers, students, and you.