Why Paleontology Collections Matter

By Alexander Kim, Museum Technician, Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Idaho.

Horse bones collected at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument. Collections can be organized by locality, epoch or taxon; sensitive information has been redacted. Photo: NPS/Alex Kim.

A limited, irreplaceable resource

For three and a half billion years, the history of life has been recorded in the rocks beneath our feet. Paleontologists use fossils — lithified traces of life, from the faint impressions of extinct microorganisms to the bones of giant animals — to rebuild the planet's past. Only a tiny fraction of life ever fossilizes, and fewer fossils still are recovered, so each is a precious, limited resource, many of them one of a kind.

Fossils show what nothing else can — that giant reptiles once dominated life on land, for example, and that before them the ancestors of mammals were abundant, until the Permian extinction 250 million years ago. Museum collections keep these specimens physically safe and scientifically intact. Yet while many people have seen fossils on display, what collections do is rarely discussed, leaving a gap between public understanding and the museum's role.

Protect and preserve

Caring for fossils takes the right facilities, equipment and training.

• Preparation frees fossils from the surrounding rock by mechanical or chemical means and rebuilds missing or broken pieces. It is delicate work that can take hundreds of hours for one specimen, and a single mistake can damage or destroy it.
• If a fossil is damaged — at discovery, during excavation or transport, or in preparation — preparation staff are best equipped to salvage it.
• Collections staff track each fossil's condition through regular inventories, and deal with hazards such as radon off-gassing using custom equipment like airtight cabinets.

Preparation labs and 3D scanning and printing tools are common where fossils are housed. Photo: NPS/Alex Kim.

Opening fossils to study

Beyond preservation, a collection's central job is access. Many fossils come from places that are hard to reach or dangerous, and some sites have become entirely inaccessible since collecting — so the collection is the best, or only, way to study them. By providing access and space, collections make the experience more equitable for scientists and visitors alike.

Interpretation is part of access too: turning scientific data into information the public can take in, which takes education, paleontological knowledge and a feel for the audience. For museums that depend on tourism and local communities, explaining why collecting and preserving fossils is worth the investment matters all the more — and good interpretation builds the public support collections need.

Keeping the data accurate

Many fossils are small enough to store by the hundreds. Here, thousands of gastropod specimens from Hagerman Fossil Beds are being reorganized and rehoused. Photo: NPS/Alex Kim.

A collection is less a storeroom than a reservoir of information. Collection managers and curators must keep accurate records so fossils keep their scientific value. Lose the data — the locality, or the other specimens found with it — and scientists lose understanding not only of that fossil but of the whole site. This was a common problem in the early years of paleontology, and it recurs when hobbyists or commercial collectors take fossils without recording where they came from, or even steal them from protected sites. Fossils on national park lands are protected by the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act.

The science

Research on collected specimens ranges from reconstructing ancient environments to functional morphology and taxonomy. Sediments are often analyzed geochemically, sometimes years after they were collected. Many fossils in collections predate now-common techniques such as isotopic analysis and CT scanning — which is why good collections practice matters: new methods keep finding new things in old specimens. Paleontology is interdisciplinary, drawing on geology, anatomy, ecology and much else.

It also bears on the present. Why do some animals go extinct, and could those conditions return? What might be the lasting effects of a human-driven mass extinction, or of climate change? Such questions matter for conserving natural resources and the animals living today.

Larger fossils that do not fit in cabinets are often kept on open shelving. Photo: NPS/Alex Kim.

In short

Museums let visitors experience fossils and give scientists hubs of information. New research keeps coming from specimens often older than the people working with them, and new techniques mean even well-studied fossils can yield new insights. Without the standard of care professional collections provide — for the fossils themselves and for their records — fossils lose much of their scientific value.

Sources

Based on Alexander Kim, "The Importance of Paleontology Collections," Park Paleontology News, volume 14, number 1, Spring 2022, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.