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The
Growth and Development of the Section of Invertebrate Paleontology
at Carnegie Museum of Natural History
INTRODUCTION
The 100-year-old Section of Invertebrate Paleontology of Carnegie
Museum of Natural History currently houses more than 800,000 invertebrate
fossil specimens. This collection is one of the top ten invertebrate
fossil collections in the country. Over 12,000 of the specimens
are types (specimens on which a fossil species is based) or figured
specimens that have been illustrated in over 400 scientific papers.
The section’s types collection is the largest in the museum.
A natural history museum’s animal, plant, and fossil collections
are like a library’s books. Andrew Carnegie understood this
and proposed that “the Carnegie Institute will be the final
home of every worthy collection”, and that collections should
be held as a resource for posterity (Carnegie Institute Bulletin,
v. 1, p.2). The earliest invertebrate fossil collections were
purchased by Andrew Carnegie from the Baron de Bayet in 1903. This
collection of over 130,000 specimens was made from classic European
localities during the late 19th Century. Since that purchase the
invertebrate paleontology collections have steadily grown through
contributions of private collections and field excursions of the
section’s staff.
INVERTEBRATE
PALEONTOLOGY – A SUBDISCIPLINE OF GEOLOGY
In the past century the discipline of paleontology has grown and
evolved from a science of "collect and name" to one that
integrates sedimentological, ecological, and evolutionary principles
into a cohesive discipline that merges life science and earth history.
As such, modern paleontologists must be as proficient in geology
as they are in the biological sciences. The history of invertebrate
paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, its collections,
staff, and their backgrounds parallel the history of paleontology.
Although their names seem similar, vertebrate paleontology and invertebrate
paleontology are disciplines having very different emphases and
origins. Vertebrate paleontologists are typically trained in anatomy
within biology departments and medical schools. In contrast, invertebrate
paleontologists typically specialize in geology and are trained
in geology departments. Consequently, workers in each discipline
have very different educational backgrounds and view fossils differently.
The Cataloguing Period
Since the first fossils from North America were collected, illustrated,
and described from the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in the 1770’s,
invertebrate paleontology has played an integral part in the sciences
of geology, biology, and evolution. Early paleontologists were little
more than collectors who described and illustrated fossils. This
stage in the development of paleontology might be called "the
cataloguing period." Paleontological publications from this
period are filled with beautiful illustrations of new species that
had been collected from rocks of various ages from around the globe.
Proof of the immensity of these endeavors can be found in the extensive
collections of the U.S. National Museum and U.S. Geological Survey
where tens of thousands of cases of collected material are housed
(J. Paleont., 65, p. 171 and Guide to the Smithsonian
Archives, 1983, no. 4, 431 p). Unfortunately, the collecting
phase far outdistanced the description efforts and many collections
were never thoroughly studied. Nonetheless, by the 1940’s
efforts were made to compile the described species into comprehensive
volumes. This compendium became the Treatise of Invertebrate
Paleontology, most volumes of which were published in the 1950’s
and 1960’s. The Treatise included illustrations of
nominal species of each genus known at the time. The Treatise
is recognized as the standard reference for the working paleontologist.
These impressive works were to find some of their most widespread
use by paleobiological theoreticians, who, without ever examining
a fossil specimen themselves, extracted diversity and range data
to produce elegant, but often fallacious, evolutionary and extinction
hypotheses. For all of their efforts, the paleobiologists failed
to heed the warnings of Shaw (1971, J. Paleontology) that
paleontologists had become "butterfingered handmaidens"
who rarely concerned themselves with the critical stratigraphic
information with which to constrain their taxonomy. By the time
this was realized in the 1990’s most of the systematics included
in the initial Treatise had been supplanted by more up-to-date
works.
Page 2: Biostratigraphy &
Paleobiology
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