The Bone Collection: Curating Fossils Through the National Park Service’s Paleontological Collections Fund

Presented by: Geology faculty/Museum of Geology experts Dr. Rachel Benton, Kayleigh Johnson, and Dr. Nathaniel Fox.

The National Park Service’s (NPS) Paleontological Collections Fund was created to support the preparation, conservation, curation, research and excavation of fossil resources collected on NPS lands and housed at the James E. Martin Paleontological Laboratory on the South Dakota Mines campus. Since May 2019, these funds have supported more than a dozen student workers, aided student research and helped curate thousands of NPS specimens. A discussion on the NPS Paleontological Collections Fund’s mission and activities to date will be presented by Dr. Rachel Benton, a geology & geological engineering faculty member at Mines; Kayleigh Johnson, Museum of Geology preparator and lab manager and Dr. Nathaniel Fox, Museum of Geology associate director.