Paleontology Laboratory California Academy of Sciences

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.

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.