Paleontology Laboratory
Research
Research
The lab maintains and has access to a number of different research facilities. The major ones for our purposes are the Geological Collections, and our computing facilities.
Fossil Collections
- The paleontological collections at the Academy comprise approximately 1.4 million lots or samples, ranging from microfossils (diatoms, foraminifera) to dinosaurs (not nearly as many). Important parts of the collections include:
- The Fossil Type Collection.
- California Cenozoic macrofossils, approximately 50% of the macrofossil collection.
- Cretaceous ammonite collection, including the Californian collection, one of the largest regional ammonite collections in the world.
- The Unocal and Chevron micropaleontological collections, comprising approximately 250,000 samples.
- A very large number of Cenozoic tropical American and Pacific Rim marine macrofossils.
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Paleontology Lab Computing (all Linux)
- High performance computers:
- Indra - A Tyan 8-way SMP AMD Opteron tower. Comprises 8 AMD 64-bit symmetric multiprocessor CPUs and 16GB high performance RAM.
- Shiva and Vishnu - A Linux-based cluster, currently comprising 12 32-bit dual-Xeon processors.
- Apollo - A Tyan Quad SMP AMD Opteron tower. Comprises 4 AMD 64-bit 2.6 GHz dual core multiprocessor CPUs and 8GB high performance RAM.
- Zeus - Web and database server.
- A small horde of individual Linux desktops and laptops.
- Specialized software (all Linux where necessary) includes Mathematica (64-bit), Stata-SE (64-bit), PAUP, Mr. Bayes, POY, etc.
Other Academy facilities of which we (and our visitors) make occasional use include the Osher Molecular Laboratory, the SEM facility, the GIS Lab, and Research Informatics.
Research Departments
415-379-5271
