Andrew,
 
Sorry to hear about your jumping fossils. But your cabinet accident is a
clear example of the need to have  collection numbers permanently written
directly on collection shells.
 
 
At 02:18 PM 5/8/98 -0500, you wrote:
>The Survey Paleontological Collection includes a large cabinet of fossils
>that was transported incorrectly, i.e., by moving it all at once instead of
>drawer by drawer. The fossil were all in chipboard trays and accompanied by
>paper labels, but none have numbers written directly on the shell. When the
>cabinet was tilted, some of the fossils were jostled into adjacent trays,
>always in the same direction. In some cases, it is easy to tell which
>fossils jumped from tray to tray; in others, it is not. The worst cases are
>those where specimens of the same species, but from different localities,
>were housed next to each other. I've been afraid to move or catalog
>anything in this cabinet. I can't just discard the specimens; they
>represent an entire stratigraphic interval and many were collected from
>localities that will never be accessible again. What's the best course of
>action?
>
>Andrew K. Rindsberg
>Curator, Paleontological Collection
>Geological Survey of Alabama
>
__________________________________________________________________________
Jose H. Leal, Ph.D.
Director, The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum
Editor-in-chief, THE NAUTILUS
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