0000000000967903
AUTHOR
Alexander Gehler
Digitisation as a tool to promote transparency between collections: the case of the Baltic amber from the Königsberg collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology
A total of 383 Baltic amber samples, including 43 type specimens, held at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Harvard University, for near a century were found to belong to the classic amber collection from the Albertus-Universität of Königsberg. This discovery was greatly facilitated by the public availability online of digital images produced during a four-year project that digitised the over 30,000 samples from the MCZ’s fossil insect collection. The amber samples were hand carried and reincorporated to the portion of the original Königsberg collection that was saved from World War II, held at the Geowissenschaftliches Museum from the Geowissenschaftliches Zentrum of the Georg-Augus…
Comment on the letter of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) dated April 21, 2020 regarding “Fossils from conflict zones and reproducibility of fossil-based scientific data”: Myanmar amber
Motivation for this comment Recently, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) has sent around a letter, dated 21st April, 2020 to more than 300 palaeontological journals, signed by the President, Vice President and a former President of the society (Rayfield et al. 2020). The signatories of this letter request significant changes to the common practices in palaeontology. With our present, multi-authored comment, we aim to argue why these suggestions will not lead to improvement of both practice and ethics of palaeontological research but, conversely, hamper its further development. Although we disagree with most contents of the SVP letter, we appreciate this initiative to discuss scien…