New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

As a result of a collaborative effort with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the entire catalogued paleontological collection of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNH), including 35,512 fossils from New Mexico, is now online and available to the general public, avocational paleontologist, researcher, and geoscience educator. We do not provide sensitive geographic locality data or some other details, but all aspects of the taxonomy, stratigraphy, and chronology of the specimens are viewable at http://164.64.119.14/nmmnh/web/default.html. The collection encompasses fossils from 5585 localities (5063 in New Mexico) ranging in age from Cambrian to Holocene. Fossils from every county in New Mexico are included in the collections. The online database is searchable by a variety of taxonomic, stratigraphic, chronologic, and geographic criteria, utilizing a “drill-down” approach that takes advantage of the hierarchical nature of these data to search for specimens or localities at several discrete levels. Taxonomic categories are principally Linnean ranks (class, order, family, genus). Stratigraphic criteria include group, formation, and member. Chronologic criteria are era, period, epoch, stage, and land vertebrate biochron (=land mammal “age”). Geographic criteria are country, state, county, and 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle. Complex (Boolean) searches are not presently a feature of the online database. However, chronologic, stratigraphic, and geographic searches will yield complete faunal lists by locality. Additionally, more than 1000 of the specimens in the database are illustrated digitally, and a jpg-file image of the fossil will appear if it is selected. We envision a wide range of research and outreach opportunities based on this database. For example, geologic mappers can readily learn the number and age of all NMMNH localities on a 7.5-minute topographic quadrangle. Similarly, educators can compile questions about fossil faunas from particular areas, times, or stratigraphic units from New Mexico or elsewhere.