Thanks to our recent digitization projects, UCMP now has topped 100,000 cataloged invertebrate specimens!
At least 6500 of these are fossil insects, millipedes and spiders digitized by Dr. Diane Erwin and undergraduate students under Berkeley’s Fossil Insect PEN. Helping make all this possible was the work by the following participants: Dr. Marwa Wafeeq Abdelkhaliq Ibraheem (Ain Shams University, Egypt; volunteer), graduate students Winnie Hsiung and Rosemary Romero, as well as undergraduate students: Iyawnna Hazard, Lin Wang, Meralina Morales, Hiep Nguyen, Madeleine Little, Meschelle Thatcher, Asma Faraj Ahmed, Julia Anderson and Emily Duda.
Over 2400 marine invertebrates from the former San Francisco State University collection have been cataloged under the direction of Drs. Lisa White and Pat Holroyd, with the help of Alexis Williams, Erica Clites and other student assistants. Hundreds of bivalves and gastropods have been cataloged from the early Eocene ponds of Wyoming by Dr. Howard Hutchison and Lauren Fowler as part of a curatorial project led by Pat Holroyd, Lisa White, and Charles Marshall.
The largest project is the Eastern Pacific Invertebrate Communities of the Cenozoic (EPICC), which has cataloged more than 38,000 new specimens over the last three years. UCMP staff Erica Clites and Lillian Pearson, as well as student assistants Katie Berlin, Patrick Garcialuna, Lesly Ann Llarena, Michele Maybee, Annemarie Peacock, Emily Turkel, Paula Gomez Villalba, Yujing Wu and Priscilla Zhang cataloged, identified and labeled specimens. We would also like to thank Austin Hendy and Katy Estes-Smargiassi of the Los Angeles County Museum and Chuck Powell (USGS-retired) for help with specimen identifications!
Funding for these projects was provided by the National Science Foundation (1503678, 1561759, 1203600, 1503671) as well as the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS MA-30-15-0336).
With more taxonomic information now online, it easier for researchers to find specimens of interest or to use the data in reconstructions of paleoclimate or paleoecology.
