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Paleontology
Laboratory
California
Academy of Sciences |
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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.
Invertebrate Zoology and Geology
California Academy of Sciences