The UCMP Invertebrates Collection includes over 31,000 catalogued specimens! Corals, crabs, bivalves, snails, ammonites… both fossil and recent — if it doesn't have a backbone, it's in this collection. I am a UCMP and Integrative Biology graduate student and have been assisting with curation of the Invertebrate Collection. I catalogue and label specimens, process loan requests, manage the Invertebrates Collection database, curate private collections that are donated to the UCMP, and do numerous other small tasks. This might sound tedious, but I really enjoy the process of curation and am constantly exposed to exciting and unique inverts. Why am I interested in animals without backbones? Well, I was hooked after my first introduction to them during an Invertebrate Zoology course, while I was an undergraduate at Rutgers University. Since taking that class, I have traveled all around the world working on projects that focus on invertebrates, including crustaceans and mollusks in the kelp forests off of Alaska; gastropods, cephalopods, and corals in Bermuda; and bivalves in Thailand. My current research takes me to the islands in the Caribbean Sea and Western Atlantic. (Read more about my research on Caribbean inverts in my previous UCMP blog post!)

The UCMP Invertebrates Collection's 31,000 cataloged specimens may sound like a lot, but the collection contains far more than 31,000 individual invertebrates. The actual holdings are nearly impossible to accurately estimate because a single specimen number could be associated with 100 individuals.  Why do we keep so many individuals of the same species from a single locality? Well, having more than one individual is extremely useful to researchers, especially when they are investigating the morphological variation of a species, because the quality of the preservation can vary from specimen to specimen.

The collection consists of specimens that were collected by museum scientists, faculty curators, and graduate students in the course of their research, as well as specimens that were donated to the museum. Some of the major holdings within the UCMP Invertebrates collection include the USGS fossil invertebrate collection, the Crawfordsville crinoid collection, the Geological Survey of California fossil invertebrate collection, the Lambert modern coral collection. For more information about the special collections within the UCMP, please check out this article written by Jere Lipps, one of our Faculty Curators.

Working as Graduate Student Researcher in the UCMP has allowed me to experience what it is like to be a museum scientist, which is something that I may want to do after I finish my PhD. Also, working in the collections has exposed me to all sorts of amazing fossils that I never would have seen otherwise, including Tessarolax sp. (marine gastropods of the Cretaceous), the strange organisms of the Vendian, and rugose corals of the Permian, to name a few.

Check back to the UCMP blog later this fall and spring for more posts about my work with the Invertebrates Collection!

Daniel Fortier visited the UCMP for two weeks this summer, investigating the taxonomy of South American crocodilians — crocodiles, caymans, and gharials. Daniel is from Brazil, where crocodiles are fairly common. He is a Ph.D. student at the Universidade Federal Do Rio Grande Do Sul in Porto Alegre, and is spending the year at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City. He is using fossils and modern skeletal materials to learn about crocodilian evolutionary history, places of origin, dispersal routes, speciation, and extinction events.

During the Miocene (from about 23 to 5 million years ago), Columbia was home to great crocodilian diversity. The UCMP has the best collection of Columbian crocodilian fossils. “Actually,” says Daniel, the UCMP “is the only one with Columbian fossils.”

This is a fossil gharial skull. Gharials (also called gavials) are a group of crocodilians with long, narrow jaws. They lived in South America during the Miocene, but are now extinct in South America. Gharials still live in parts of India. Daniel is trying to learn more about their evolution, biogeography, and extinction.

Daniel's visit was supported by the Welles Fund, an endowment that supports paleontological research at the UCMP. Click here to learn how you can support research at the UCMP.

Watch this video and join UCMP graduate student Kaitlin Maguire on a field trip to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument! After visiting the park last spring, Kaitlin decided it's the perfect place to do her dissertation research.

"When you do a field project for paleontology, especially if you're looking for fossils, you never know what you're going to find — you never know if there's going to be enough data," says Kaitlin. But paleontologists from the UCMP and elsewhere have been studying the John Day Fossil Beds since the early 1900s. "There's a wealth of information to build on," she says. "I'm not just walking into the unknown."

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

A few fun facts about the John Day Fossil Beds:

• The fossil beds, in eastern Oregon, were named for the John Day River, which runs through the area. The river got its name because of an incident that occurred at the river's mouth in 1812. A fur trapper named John Day was robbed by Native Americans — he was relieved of all of his belongings, including his clothes. Thereafter, the river was referred to as the John Day River.
• Over 35,000 fossil specimens have been excavated from the John Day Fossil Beds. Many of those specimens were collected by UCMP paleontologists; the UCMP collections include thousands of fossils from John Day.
• The John Day Fossil Beds National Monument has a paleontologist on staff, as do several other National Parks. Learn more about paleontology at the John Day on the Monument's website.

David Dufeau, a graduate student from Ohio University, spent a few days at the UCMP this July, studying the development and evolution of the middle-ear sinuses in archosaurs — birds and crocodilians. He explains that the sinuses in these animals were so greatly expanded that they completely surrounded the braincase. By understanding these super-sized sinuses in the archosaurs, David hopes to infer something about the nature of auditory receptivity. Maybe the sinuses expanded as adaptations for hearing in terrestrial and aquatic habitats. David can look at the sinuses in fossilized skulls, but he has no way of knowing whether these animals suffered from middle ear infections or terrible sinus headaches.

David's visit was supported by the Welles Fund, an endowment that supports paleontological research at the UCMP. Click here to learn how you can support research at the UCMP.

This summer, Carolyn Rounds visited the UCMP to study our Moropus fossils. Carolyn is a grad student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And Moropus is an extinct horse-like creature, part of a taxonomic group called chalicotheres.

Chalicotheres are pretty unique — they had claws instead of hooves. They didn’t use their claws to rip apart prey; they were herbivores, and they probably used their claws to pull vegetation down from trees. Chalicotheres lived in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa; they are all now extinct. Chalicotheres are part of a larger group, the perissodactyls, or odd-toed ungulates. Living perissodactyls include horses, zebras, tapirs, and rhinos.

For her Masters degree, Carolyn is describing a species of Moropus that has not been described before — a new species. Here at the UCMP, she’s looking at fossils from the Flint Hill formation in South Dakota. The differences between Carolyn’s Moropus and the species that have already been described are subtle. The facets of the ankle bones — where the bones meet each other — have a slightly different shape than other species. The vertebrae of this species are also a bit different. Carolyn is taking careful notes and making beautiful drawings of the UCMP fossils, so she can compare them to fossils she’s examining at other museums. This summer, she’s making a grand tour of natural history museums. So far, she’s visited The American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the University of Nebraska State Museum, and the South Dakota School of Mines. Next week, she’ll travel to the Los Angeles County Museum.