ABSTRACT

This project will make one of the key Ordovician fossil collections in the nation digitally accessible for research and public use. The Ordovician Period was the second greatest period in the history of animal life, about 485 to 444 million years ago. The diversity of life increased remarkably during the Ordovician Period until the mass extinction event at the end of the Period. The Indiana University Paleontology Collection has systematically documented fossil records of 10 million years leading up to the extinction, including a series of fossils that were collected in the early 1900s when a new railway grade was cut through Indiana's Ordovician rocks along Tanner's Creek near Cincinnati. The fossils in the Ordovician collection document the migration of ancient marine organisms in response to changing sea level, demonstrate evolutionary adaptation to changing environments, and reveal ecological interactions that help explain why some groups survived the extinction and others did not. Digitizing the collections makes this material accessible for large-scale quantitative scientific studies. Importantly, digitization also makes these incredible fossils available to students, teachers, and fossil enthusiasts in Indiana, across the nation, and around the world. This project will involve K-12 teachers in developing school curriculum exercises based on the fossils and on the digitization process. It will also engage the region's avocational paleontological community in the digitization initiative, giving them unprecedented access to the same fossil research collections used by scientists.

The paleontological holdings that will be digitized through this project include macrofossils and thin sections that were collected along the entire Ordovician outcrop of the Kope, Dillsboro, and Whitewater Formations in Indiana. The species are closely tied to a series of well-documented measured sections that provide stratigraphic and sedimentological context. The material includes an extensive and unique series of bryozoan thin sections produced by E.R. Cumings and J.J. Galloway. This material adds substantially to the PaleoNICHES digitization initiative of the Cincinnati Arch by filling in its entire western flank. Inter-basin dispersals between the Cincinnati Arch and western epicontinental seas were mediated by rises and falls in sea level through the late Ordovician Period that iteratively flooded and exposed the transcontinental arch. Spatially and temporally resolved digital occurrences of complete faunas are used to study the timing of dispersal events and changes in ecological associations that were mediated by these eustatic changes. This project will utilize the stratigraphic and taxonomic backbone of the digitized collections from the Cincinnati Arch region to serve as a launchpad for engaging K-12 students and citizen scientists using the Notes from Nature transcription portal. This rich, interactive content will be generated for smartphone apps (including the Digital Atlas of Ancient Life) to expand the use of biological collections data into regional K-12 classrooms and online, via curated curricula hosted on iDigPaleo. High-quality specimen data and images will also be made available through iDigBio (www.idigbio.org).

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