From card catalogs to computers: databases in vertebrate paleontology

ABSTRACT

Data, whether images, measurements, counts, occurrences, or character codings, are a cornerstone of vertebrate paleontology. Every published paper, master's thesis, and doctoral dissertation relies on these data to document patterns and processes in evolution, ecology, taphonomy, geography, geologic time, and functional morphology, to name just a few. In turn, the vertebrate paleontology community relies on published data in order to reproduce and verify others’ work, as well as to expand upon published analyses in new ways without having to reconstitute data sets that have been used by earlier authors and to accurately preserve data for future generations of researchers. Here, we review several databases that are of interest to vertebrate paleontologists and strongly advocate for more deposition of basic research data in publicly accessible databases by vertebrate paleontologists.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would first like to thank all of the vertebrate paleontologists who have painstakingly unearthed, prepared, studied, and described fossils. Their work have always been, and always will be, the foundation on which our science is based. Without them, we would have no taxa in our character matrices, no occurrence data for our diversity curves, nor any paleoecological data to interpret past climates. Second, we would like to thank all of the people who have already begun to deposit their current data in online databases. Your actions in this regard are both fruitful to your own research program, but also benefit the community greatly by providing easy access to your data for further analysis and research. Finally, thanks to all of those who keystroke legacy data into databases, giving us all new access to old data that may have been temporarily lost from field through neglect. The PIs of Morphbank gratefully acknowledge funding from the US National Science Foundation for its development (awards 0446224 to A.M., G.E., and colleagues and award 0851313 to A.M. and colleagues).

Handling editor: Blaire Van Valkenburgh