1. Fossil Insect Collaborative
Digitization Project
DM Smith, SH Butts, A Dooley, MS Engel, BD Farrell, DA
Grimaldi, S Heads, T Karim, CA Norris
Fossilinsects.colorado.edu

3. Research Goals
 The fossil insect data are of great importance to
understanding insect response to environmental
change and patterns of biodiversity through time.
 These fossils can aid in phylogenetic
reconstruction, examinations of the evolution of
morphological characteristics and in studies of
overall patterns of diversification in deep time.

4. Project Goals
The Fossil Insect Collaborative will make
available all the major collections of fossil
insect specimens in the United States by
creating electronic specimen records
consisting of digital images and associated
collection data.

5. Pensoft.org
amnh.org
Partners - PIs
American Museum of Natural History – David Grimaldi
CU Museum of Natural History – Dena Smith & Talia Karim
Illinois Natural History Survey - Sam Heads
Museum of Comparative Zoology – Harvard – Brian Farrell
University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute – Michael Engel
Virginia Museum of Natural History – Alton Dooley
Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History - Susan Butts and
Chris Norris

6. Collaborating Institutions
Florissant Fossil Beds N.M. – Herbert Meyer
National Museum of Natural History - Smithsonian
–Kathy Hollis, Finnegan Marsh, Conrad Labandeira

7. Fossil Insect Collaborative
~500,000 fossil insect specimens, images and
associated metadata
Funded through NSF – Advancing the Digitization of
Biological Collections
Project Duration: 4 Year Project
Start Date: July 15th, 2013
Amount funded: ~2.3 million (overall)

8. Digitization Goals
# of specimens to be
databased
# of Specimens to be
imaged
American Museum of Natural
History
Harvard Museum of Comparative
Zoology
Illinois Natural History Survey
46,500*
20,000
Total Number of Digital Fossil
Insect Specimen Records
by end of project
60,000
30,443
15,000
59,854
10,000
5,000
10,000
University of Colorado at Boulder
74,649
25,000
100,000
University of Kansas Biodiversity
Institute
Virginia Museum of Natural
History
5,625
4,000
6,000
8,455
8,910
8,910
Yale Peabody Museum
1,558
8,343
8,343
N/A
N/A
224,000
N/A
N/A
2,163
175,672
76,253
479,270
Institution
National Museum of Natural
History**
Florissant Fossil Beds National
Monument***
Total

9. iDigPaleo - Hub
iDigPaleo will be used to aggregate specimen
data and low resolution images from
collaborators and then to serve these data to
the National Hub at iDigBio (www.idigbio.org)
and the Paleontology Portal
(www.paleoportal.org).

10. iDig Paleo - Hub
The model will be implemented for use with the
open-source MySQL relational database
system.
A novel feature of iDigPaleo will be the
incorporation of social networking tools to
enable users to interact directly with the project
dataset for a wide variety of purposes.

12. Future Partners
PENs
Burke Museum – University of Washington
Field Museum – Chicago
Milwaukee Public Museum
UC Berkeley
DMNS
Cross - TCN Collaborations
Southwest Collections of Arthropods Network
Tri-Trophic Interactions TCN
PaleoNiches TCN

13. iDig Paleo - Hub
Central resource to interact with bio and geo
cyberinfrastructure initiatives.

14. Broader Impacts
 Development of mobile apps and modules (NGSS)
 Testing of activiites in EVOLUTIONs after school
program at Yale-Peabody
 SHRMP (Science High School Research Mentoring
Program) at AMNH

15. fossilinsects.colorado.edu