Gary recognized the fundamental importance of a permanent repository for paleontological speciemens to meet IU's research needs professional and regulatory requirements of scientific publishers, grant agencies, and research permitters.
The fund supports ongoing costs of housing and curating our material, as well as digitizing it to make it accessible to researchers around the world and to the public. Our target is $1 million to support the salaries and activities of a full time collection manager and to meet costs for cabinetry, renovation, and materials.
Our core needs are...
- To develop and protect the collection;
- To enhance faculty and student research and share the results through publication and creative development of biodiversity informatics;
- To optimize storage of the collection with state-of-the-art compactor shelving;
- To facilitate research, preparation, and field work with the assistance of a full-time collection manager;
- To support student education, including access to our collections and facilities by researchers from around the world;
- To develop our capacity to apply new tools from geochemistry, stratigraphy, informatics, ecometrics, morphometrics, and analytical paleobiology to long-standing questions about critical transitions in the history of Earth and life.
If you wish to support our program or are considering a large-scale gift, please click on the "Give Now" button below to go directly to the fund at the IU Foundation.
You can also contact one of the faculty curators (Claudia Johnson, claudia@indiana.edu, David Polly, pdpolly@indiana.edu, or Jackson Njau, jknjau@indiana.edu), the Development Officer of the College of Arts and Sciences Jeff Stuckey (stuckeyj@indiana.edu), or the IU Foundation.