Vietti part of fossil digitization

A $100,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) was recently provided to the University of Wyoming Geological Museum. That money will go toward making more of the museum’s rare fossil mammal collection available to researchers, schools and the public through digitization of roughly 5,000 items.

Thermopolis native and UW Geological Museum and collections manager Laura Vietti explained the ultimate goal is to digitize the entire collection, which is not economically feasible at this point.

Instead, the digitized items will be from the time right before and right after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Vietti noted the timeframe is not immediately around the time of the extinction and covers a broader spectrum, roughly plus or minus 30 million years from the actual event.

As for what fossils will be digitized, Vietti said it would be a subset of the best preserved and most interesting fossils that give an idea of what the ecosystem of Wyoming was like. The majority of the museum’s specimens were found in Wyoming, and over half of them were found on public lands, such as state or BLM.

The University of Wyoming Geological Museum has only one-half of 1 percent of its fossils on display to the public. The other 99.5 percent are stored away, and are rarely seen.

The two-year digitization project is titled “The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-PG) Fossil Mammal Project: Digitizing and Sharing Wyoming’s Rare Fossil Mammal Collection for Understanding Mammal Extinction and Recovery through Ecosystem Collapse.” The grant will go toward making 15,000 quality images of rare mammal species, some of which are as small as the head of a pin. Vietti said the grant was received Oct. 1, so the process is in its infancy.

The digitization will take place through the use of a Keyence imaging station. Vietti noted this station allows for extremely high magnification while still being able to keep focus. With the use of a digital microscope and the Keyence imaging station, multiple photos can be taken of each part of a fossil — even a tooth the size of the head of a pin — through a technique known as “focal stacking.”

Vietti, who will oversee project activities, will train students in using the station. A scale bar and information on each specimen will be added to images, she said, and the images themselves will be saved as two different file types.

The images will be put on the UW website, which is searchable, as well as a more public database which is accessible to educators and others. The highest resolution images will be archived at the museum.

Vietti will also be helping the UW Libraries Digital Collections Office integrate and transfer images onto online portals and helping the director of the Wyoming State Science Fair generate promotional materials and help facilitate high school science fair research projects using the digitized fossil collections.

Chad Hutchens, director of the UW Libraries Digital Collections Office, said, ““We have mammal fossils from both sides of the meteor event,” which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Hutchens will coordinate with Information Technology and the Advanced Research Computing Center to secure web-accessible and preservation-level storage of all specimen images and associated metadata. He also will supervise an undergraduate student who will handle file management, file transfer, metadata entry and quality assurance.

With the images, Vietti said a mammal can be identified by its tooth. Additionally, a tooth can provide clues to that animal’s diet, the actual size of the animal and even the last meal it ate.

“We are looking at a pool of mammals that came before the mammals we know today,” Vietti said. “Most mammals we know in Wyoming evolved from ancestors of these.”

A 2002 graduate of Hot Springs County High School, Vietti said she comes from a long line of geologists and fossil collectors, so much of her youth was also spent collecting fossils. She also worked as a volunteer then an intern at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center before she became a paleotechnician and collections manager at the center. She noted that position was a key point in her getting her current positions at the UW Geological Museum.

The center, she said, is really accommodating in helping students understand and explore fossils.

Erin Stoesz, cousin of Jeb Schenck and the Wyoming State Science Fair coordinator, will introduce and promote the digitized rare mammal fossil collection for use in science fair research projects, particularly at the high school level.

Mark Clementz, director and curator of the UW Geological Museum, will assist in specimen selection; will aid Vietti and Stoesz in generating outreach material; and will work with high school students on science fair projects using the digitized fossil mammal collection.

Two UW graduate assistants and two undergraduate students will assist with project activities. To ensure long-term preservation, the images and specimen records will be archived on UW servers. The museum will collaborate with Wyoming high school educators and students to use the digitized fossil mammal collection images in classroom activities and Wyoming State Science Fair research projects, further enhancing educational use of the collections.

Since she became museum manager three years ago, Vietti says this project has been a personal interest of hers.

“This is a digital way to open our collection doors to Wyoming, the country and the world,” she said. “People won’t have to physically loan these specimens. We won’t have to send them across the world.”