Research

October 13, 2014 at 12:51 pm

Stigall Lab Working on Digital Atlas of Ordovician Life in Cincinnati Region

The Kallmeyer Collection of the Ohio University Invertebrate Paleontology Collections includes invasive species that dominated the ancient landscape of Cincinnati, Ohio. The invaders include brachiopods, gastropods, bivalves, and corals. (Photo by Ben Siegel.)

The Kallmeyer Collection of the Ohio University Invertebrate Paleontology Collections includes invasive species that dominated the ancient landscape of Cincinnati, Ohio. The invaders include brachiopods, gastropods, bivalves, and corals. (Photo by Ben Siegel.)

October 2014 Geological Sciences Newsletter

Members of Dr. Alycia Stigall’s lab—involving more than a dozen graduate and undergraduate students over the past three years—are capitalizing on a newly donated collection of Late Ordovician fossils to build a digital collection and online.

The Stigall lab efforts are focused on building a comprehensive online guide to the fossils and stratigraphy of Late Ordovician deposits in the Cincinnati, OH, region.

So far, an extensive information-rich website (www.ordovicianatlas.org) has been built, along with standards-aligned K-12 lesson plans, and keys for species identification.

The Ordovician Atlas is part of the NSF-funded PaleoNICHES project that will produce comparable digital atlas for Neogene fossil of the Gulf Coast and Pennsylvanian fossils of the Midcontinent—along with mobile apps to access all three atlases.

Read more about this project at www.AtlasofAncientLife.org or follow us on Twitter @PaleoDigAtlas. Check out the university magazine “Perspectives” (Spring/Summer 2014 issue) for an article on “What the small, clam-like brachiopod can tell us about how species compete, survive, or face extinction,”

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