LARAMIE – The University of Wyoming Geological Museum is best known for its largest specimens – a 75-foot apatosaurus skeleton and “Big Al,” the most complete allosaurus fossil ever unearthed, among them.
But the museum is also home to some 41,000 other specimens, most of which are hidden away in a climate-controlled room only ever visited by a handful of researchers.
“Primarily, it’s a space issue,” said Laura Vietti, UW Geological Museum and collections manager. “We only have so much museum space and we don’t have room to display every single fossil we have.”
Just one half of 1 percent of the UW Fossil Vertebrate Collection is on display in the museum, but thanks to an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant, the public will gain online access to roughly 20 times more specimens.
“Of those 41,000 specimens, we choose specimens that best represent Wyoming’s paleontological or fossil history,” Vietti said. “We pick the nicer specimens, or the best preserved specimens to put on public display just because they’re visually more interesting (and) they provide more information.”
A $100,000 grant – matched by a UW cost share of $119,858 – will allow Vietti and a team of students to digitize some 5,000 mammal fossils.
“It’s killing two birds with one stone,” Vietti said. “We’re making research-quality images to promote the use of the collections, as well as encourage researchers to visit the selections. But it’s also a way to give the public access to the collections in a way that is feasible.”
Vietti said the collections database created through this project will be useful to researchers, but could be difficult to navigate for the average member of the public and often requires researchers to know exactly what they are looking for.
“We’re working on other ways to deliver the specimen images to the public in a more user-friendly way,” Vietti said. “We’re not quite sure what that final product will be, but it will probably be some sort of website where you can search and look for the specimens in more layman’s terms, in a way that’s understandable to the public and to K-12 education.”
Students, both undergraduate and graduate, will use a digital microscope at an imaging station to take high resolution photos of fossilized bones or teeth, some of which are incredibly tiny.
With a process known as focal stacking, the imaging station takes multiple photos of the bone or tooth at various distances. The photos, taken together, form a composite image that is entirely in focus.
Vietti said researchers can use these images to identify mammals and, in some cases, determine the animal’s final meal.
Vietti added learning how to digitize collections will give her students a head-start when they graduate and begin looking for jobs with museums and universities.
“It’s going to enable these students to gain some really good experience working with digitizing collections and the collections management aspect,” Vietti said. “It’s something that most museums will be looking to do in
Fossils to be digitized include mammals from both before and after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction – better known as the meteor event that wiped out the dinosaurs roughly 65 million years ago.
“We’re hand-selecting specimens that best represent the fossils themselves as well as the time period, so this is just a small percentage, but it’s going to be a really good quality,” Vietti said. “My goal through the rest of my career here at the University of Wyoming is to work on digitizing all of the specimens, but this is a good start.”
Researchers are sometimes permitted to visit the museum’s fossil collections repository in the Geology Building, but the project aims to make research easier, while opening the museum’s collection up to a wider audience.
“Since we are a research institution, if somebody has an academic question, or if they physically come to Laramie and they have a valid reason to look at those collections, they absolutely can look at those collections. But that’s not going to happen very often, mostly because we’re so far away,” Vietti said. “So this is a way to digitally open our doors to the state and the world.”
