News
This summer, a new exhibit about the trilobites opened on the third floor of the KU Natural History Museum. The exhibit includes trilobite evolution, morphology (characteristics) and extinction. KU Invertebrate Paleontology staff and faculty, including curator Bruce Lieberman, helped develop the exhibit. Specimens from the invertebrate paleontology collection are on display.
The museum is open Tuesday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays, noon to 5 p.m., and is located at 1345 Jayhawk Blvd.
Flickr photos from the album Trilobite Exhibit by KU Biodiversity
Diplurid spider, Cretaceous era, Brazil
The National Science Foundation has granted $1.5 million for a KU project that will bring greater access to the extensive data contained in The Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology.
The Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, founded in 1948 by an international consortium of paleontological societies, is considered to be the most authoritative compilation of data on invertebrate fossils. The Treatise has applications in many areas, such as understanding evolution and the study of climate change.
The grant will make the vast repository of paleontological data in the Treatise available in electronic form for current and future scientists, and the public. The grant will also help develop computational tools for analyzing, modeling, and visualizing paleontological data.
The "knowledgebase" created using the grant is expected to open transformational opportunities in scientific discovery to help understand the complexity of nature. In addition to scientific applications, a planned website will enable anyone to explore fossils online.
Grant details:
Title: “Computational Methods to Enable an Invertebrate Paleontology Knowledgebase”
Lead Investigator: Xuewen Chen
CO-PIs: Paul Selden, Brian Potetz, Luke Huan and Bo Luo
Amount: $1.5 million over 4 years.
After more than 50 years in the realm of print, the whole of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology is available in digital form (as searchable pdf files) through the Paleontological Institute web site. Downloadable PDF chapters of current volumes are available, as are single CDs of each volume, and a DVD or a set of 30 CDs of the entire Treatise series.