The Morrison Formation Sauropod Consensus: A freely accessible online spreadsheet of collected sauropod specimens, their housing institutions, contents, references, localities, and other potentially useful informationuse asterix (*) to get italics
Emanuel Tschopp, John A. Whitlock, D. Cary Woodruff, John R. Foster, Roberto Lei, Simone GiovanardiPlease use the format "First name initials family name" as in "Marie S. Curie, Niels H. D. Bohr, Albert Einstein, John R. R. Tolkien, Donna T. Strickland"
<p>The Morrison Formation has been explored for dinosaurs for more than 150 years, in particular for large sauropod skeletons to be mounted in museum exhibits around the world. Several long-term campaigns to the Jurassic West of the United States produced hundreds of specimens, ranging from isolated, fragmentary bones to nearly complete skeletons of these enormous herbivorous animals. Given the sheer number of specimens, keeping track of what is housed in which institution is paramount to study variability, taxonomy, and consequently geographic and temporal distribution of the various species and genera recognized from the Morrison Formation. In an attempt to facilitate these studies, we have compiled an online spreadsheet intended to combine all the available information on sauropod specimens from collection databases, published literature, and personal observations. These include lists of contents of the specimens, in what institution the material is housed, references mentioning, describing, figuring, providing measurements and/or 3D scans, locality data and stratigraphy, as well as other potentially useful data for research purposes. The spreadsheet is openly accessible, but editing is currently restricted to the authors of this study, in order to ensure high-quality data curation to keep the file as useful as possible.</p>
collaborative project, Morrison Formation, open science, sauropod dinosaurs
Fossil record, Methods, Paleobiodiversity, Taxonomy, Vertebrate paleontology