Week Two

This past week marks down the second week of my invertebrate/vertebrate paleontology internship. While I have learned many skills both in and out of the lab, it is important for me to also remember that my work for the collections is contributing to a "bigger picture".

The work that I am doing alongside my partner Jasmine is vital for many reasons. The main focus of our job is to contribute to digitizing specimens from the late Cretaceous period. By providing an easily accessible platform for researcher and students alike to find specimens that may help them, then they can more effectively conduct research. Museum collections can tell us so much. For example, by looking at a fossil that lived in a certain time period, we can find out things about the past world such as climate. By obtaining this information, we can then compare it to today's climate, and make scientifically supported predictions about how climate change will effect us.

All of this would not be possible if museums like the Peabody didn't properly preserve specimens and make them accessible for research.