Science Museum of Minnesota

The Science Museum of Minnesota will digitize a collection of over 8,000 fossils from the Wannagan Creek site in North Dakota. The 60-million-year-old fossils document a broad range of life from the ancient ecosystem, from fungus to primates. Building on a previous IMLS-funded project, the museum will photograph, rehouse, and create digital catalog records for the fossil collection. The project will support a temporary full-time paleontology collections assistant, who will perform the majority of the digitization. To enhance the accessibility of the collection by the scientific community and the public, the museum will make the digital records available on iDigBio and GBIF, two free open-access databases for biological collections. In addition, the museum will host outreach events, create numerous social media posts, and develop a new educational kit to share the collection publicly and create opportunities for future research.