The Belgrade PaleoBlitz: A pilot project to engage amateur paleontologists

Abstract

Paleontology is an interdisciplinary field that attracts a range of individuals, from hobbyists to professionals. A primary goal of the NSF-funded FOSSIL Project is to establish a unified community of paleontologists and promote best practices in the field of paleontology. The Belgrade PaleoBlitz was a pilot effort to meet these goals by guiding participants through the museum curation process via a rapid two-day immersion. The objectives of the PaleoBlitz event were to: 1) educate participants in best practices associated with the museum curation process, and 2) catalog specimens collected from the Belgrade Quarry into the Florida Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontology collections. These objectives seek to find a balance between educating participants and contributing to science. A pre-event application dispersed to amateur paleontology clubs throughout the United States determined applicants' baseline content knowledge and practices. To facilitate learning and promote networking, we selected 13 participants who varied in expertise from six different paleontology organizations. Immediate and delayed post-event surveys assessed acceptance and implementation of best practices, confidence related to specific aspects of the museum curation process, and expansion of individuals' personal paleontology network. Responses showed that all participants made changes to their existing collections, felt more confident in specific aspects of the museum curation process, and had continued connections with other participants after this event.

Inferring the age and environmental characteristics of fossil sites using citizen science

“…Thus far, most biology-related citizen science projects have assessed extant biodiversity and assisted in conservation management [4][5][6][7]. However, citizen scientists have rarely been engaged in palaeontology research for reasons including that fossils can be fragile and difficult to access [8,9]. At the time of writing, only one palaeontology project was identified from more than 3000 projects listed on the global citizen science hub, SciStarter (using search terms: 'fossil' and 'palaeontology/paleontology'; https://scistarter.org/).…”

Follow the Fossils

“…Additionally, paleontology includes a dedicated community of amateur (also called avocational) paleontologists who contribute to the field via curating their personal fossil collections, working with museums, and sponsoring graduate students through scholarships (Catalani, 2014). 2 Paleontology outreach and education has a long history in communities connected to local natural history museums (Clark 2014;Sheffield and Bauer 2017;Perez et al, 2020) and has moved to a model of meeting people where they are (i.e. nontraditional spaces of learning like comic-cons) to reach new and more diverse audiences (Stoneburg et al, 2020).…”