Reference Request
Finding Aids to Official Records of the Smithsonian Institution Archives
Accession 21-054
National Museum of National History
Website Records, 2019-2020
Descriptive Entry
This accession consists of five sections of the National Museum of Natural History website maintained by the Department of Paleobiology that were removed during a recent refresh of the site.
The section dedicated to Joseph Augustine Cushman, known as the father of American micropaleontology, was crawled on November 20, 2019. Cushman was a pioneer in the use of foraminifera to support oil exploration in North America, developing a classification method that for the first time allowed foraminifera to be used for borehole correlation. This website section provides biographical information, contributions to science, and information about related collections at the National Museum of Natural History.
The Burgess Shale section, crawled on November 20, 2019, provides information about fossils discovered by Secretary Charles D. Walcott in 1909 in the Burgess Shale rock formation in the Canadian Rockies. These fossils are more than half a billion years old and reside in the National Museum of Natural History collections.
The Springer Echinoderm Collection section, crawled on November 20, 2019, provides information about the world's largest repository of fossil crinoids, donated by collector Frank Springer to the United States National Museum in 1911. The fossils are mostly from Paleozoic sequences in North America and Europe.
The Mazon Creek Fossil Flora section, crawled on November 20, 2019, discusses the Mazon Creek (River) fossil deposit which extends over a wide area of northeastern Illinois. The fossils are best known from concretions or nodules of siderite, an iron carbonate mineral, which generally must be fractured to expose a plant or animal fossil within. Fossils from this area reside in many museums, including a modest-size collection at the National Museum of Natural History.
The Green River Fossil Collections section, crawled on April 6, 2020, discusses the National Museum of Natural History's fossil collection from the Green River Formation in Colorado and Utah as well as the collector of the majority of the fossils, amateur paleontologist David Kohls. The fossils are approximately 50 million years old. Each rock usually contains an abundance of insects and floral material, primarily leaves. Also found are spiders, downy feathers, flowers, and reptiles.
Materials are in electronic format.
Index Terms
This collection is indexed under the following access terms. These are links to collections with related topics, persons or places.
Name
- Cushman, Joseph A. (Joseph Augustine), 1881-1949
- Walcott, Charles D., (Charles Doolittle), 1850-1927
- Springer, Frank, 1848-1927
- Kohls, David
- National Museum of Natural History (U.S.). Department of Paleobiology
- United States National Museum
Subject
- Web sites
- Museums -- Public relations
- Natural history museums
- Paleobiology
- Paleontologists
- Micropaleontology
- Foraminifera, Fossil
- Petroleum -- Prospecting
- Petrology -- North America
- Fossils -- North America
- Formations (Geology)
- Echinodermata
- Museums -- Collection management
- Crinoidea
- Fossils -- Europe
- Siderite
- Burgess Shale (B.C.)
- Canadian Rockies (B.C. and Alta.)
- Mazon River (Ill.)
- Green River Formation
Physical Characteristics of Materials in the Collection
Administrative Information
Preferred Citation
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Accession 21-054, National Museum of National History, Website Records