IIn September 1972, Dr. John L. Carter, an expert on Carboniferous brachiopods, was appointed Associate Curator of the section. Dr. Carter's first order of business was to consolidate the invertebrate fossil collections into one location from their scattered repositories throughout the museum. He assembled them in what became Room 13, and for the first time in section history the collections were in one place. This assembly took Dr. Carter nearly two years. In 1977, he hired Albert Kollar as collection assistant. Mr. Kollar ultimately became and remains the section’s collections manager. The following year the section was moved to its current quarters. In 1988, Dr. Carter had the section renamed to the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology. After organizing the collections, Dr. Carter continued his study of brachiopods. He published more than 23 research papers, in which he named more than 130 new species and 23 new genera.

Concurrent with Dr. Carter’s research efforts, collections manager Kollar organized and identified the collections made by previous curators. This curation activity was compounded by Dr. Carter's acquisition of 110,000 Mississippian specimens from Iowa donated by Mr. A. Gerk, 8,900 specimens from Dr. C. Germain, and 54,000 Pennsylvanian specimens from Dr. D. K. Brezinski. During Dr. Carter’s tenure as curator, the section’s collections more than doubled. Before he retired in March of 1999 Dr. Carter coauthored the revised Treatise on Brachiopods. From the spring of 1999 to the Fall of 2002 collections manager Kollar oversaw the running of the section. During that time the trilobite Ameropiltonia lauradanae was chosen as the section logo.

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