20/07/2023

Dr. Julien Kimming

16:00 Uhr

Museum collections are a vast repository of information and some of the most important paleontological discoveries in recent years have been made in the drawers of museum basements that haven’t been opened in decades. But while it is important to perform research on museum collections, it is as important to understand the context of the specimens you are looking at, something that can be more complicated than the actual description of the specimens. Associated data is often missing, incomplete, or just not up to modern standards and in these cases, supplementing museum data with new field data is essential. Insights into the usefulness and issues surrounding museum specimens and the importance of supplementing such historical collections with new fieldwork will be discussed, based on two Cambrian deposits with exceptional fossil preservation: the Spence Shale of Utah, USA and the Haiyan Lagerstätte of China.