Greeting you at the entrance of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) is the ever-charismatic Nation’s T. rex, immediately grabbing your attention and drawing you in. Within the UCMP collections area your eyes dart to extinct marine reptiles lining the walls, plant fossils in the aisles with leaves larger than your torso, and woolly mammoth skulls tucked between cabinets. As a vertebrate paleontologist I’m captivated by these grand fossils, making it easy to overlook the collections’ smaller residents. However, thanks to an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) grant, this summer I was able to get hands-on experience with some of the UCMP’s forgotten fossils and learn what makes Cambrian and Ordovician (~541-445ma) marine invertebrates, such as trilobites, crinoids, and many others, so special.
Before there were animals and plants on land, or fish in the oceans, invertebrates dominated marine environments during the Cambrian and Ordovician. These geologic time periods record one of the most important intervals in life’s history, providing insight into early animal evolution, rapid diversification of life in the oceans, and record several important extinction events. These unique and irreplaceable historical collections, and their associated archival data, serve as an important scientific resource with incredible value. Unfortunately, much of this data was in danger of being lost due to: 1) deteriorating field tags and notes, 2) the lack of a digital catalog record, and/or 3) some of the fossil localities no longer being accessible, such as in Russia and Mexico.
Over the summer, I worked alongside UCMP invertebrate museum scientist, Dr. Ashley Dineen, rehousing, photographing, and creating digital records of UCMP’s Cambrian and Ordovician fossils, as well as digitizing archival records such as field notes. Our overarching goal was to preserve these historical and scientific collections by increasing the integration, accessibility, and associated data for both research and educational purposes. The results of this project will serve as a valuable resource for researchers, land managers, early Paleozoic workers, and those making biostratigraphic correlations.
Garnering less attention than the more diagnostic Cambrian fauna (like trilobites and brachiopods) are a collection of fossils that don’t look like much more than fingerprint impressions. Originally discovered by Dr. John Wyatt Durham in the early 1960’s, these ‘fossil fingerprints’ are known as Helicoplacoids and are the oldest group of Echinoderms (in the same Phylum as sea urchins, starfish, sea cucumbers, and sand dollars). Durham completed his Ph.D. at Berkeley and later worked at the University as a Professor of Paleontology. He conducted field work in the summers, mostly in eastern California, donating all of his finds to UCMP, which now contains the most extensive assemblage of helicoplacoid specimens in the world. These localities in the White Mountains of California are the only place in the world where complete specimens have been recovered.
Helicoplacoids can be found in the same fossil beds as trilobites, however, unlike their omnivorous counterparts, helicoplacoids were filter feeders. With a fusiform shape, they lived in burrows and were able to extend the length of their bodies outside of the burrow for feeding and then contract back into the burrow when finished or if they felt threatened. Contracting and expanding also played a role in feeding and gas exchange. Helicoplacoids were covered in ossicles that formed a spiral pleating around their bodies, creating some form of armor and protection. Running lengthwise around their body between two of these spirals was a long groove which functioned as the helicoplacoids mouth. The first scientific paper, published in the journal, Science, in 1963 by Durham, described Helicoplacoids as a new Class of Echinoderms due to their unique features. For reference, less than 10 Classes of the Kingdom Animalia have been discovered in the last century (Mora et al., 2011), while 1-2 new species are described per day!
In addition to digitizing the helicoplacoids, we restored a portion of the late Dr. William Berry’s (Director of UCMP, 1976-1987) graptolite collection; one of the largest and most complete biostratigraphic collections of its kind. Graptolites were planktonic colonial animals that had a worldwide distribution and distinctive morphologies that changed gradually through time, making them ideal for correlating the ages of rocks from many different geographic areas. Berry’s research on graptolites shed important light on ancient environments, the precise age and correlation of rocks, processes of evolution and extinction, and the positions of ancient continents and ocean basins. From his collection, Berry helped assemble geologic age correlation charts that are the basis for more precise charts used by geologists, paleontologists, and even oil exploration companies today.
By the end of my eight weeks working in the UCMP invertebrate collections, we rehoused over 2,000 fossils into vials or archival boxes, created over 300 new digital records, and scanned several seasons worth of accompanying field notes. Having the opportunity to work in the invertebrate collections this summer was an invaluable experience. The UCMP’s helicoplacoid and graptolite collections are remarkable, providing vital clues for understanding how life originated in the oceans, while also adding to our understanding of how early life shaped the evolutionary and ecological context of our world today. The digitization of these collections will not only benefit the research of Berkeley staff, students, and postdoctoral scholars, but also increase accessibility for researchers from other institutions across the country and around the world.