From 2013 to 2016, I led a collections-improvement project* at the Field Museum curating a large collection of vertebrate fossils from the Washakie Basin of Wyoming. These ~46 million year-old fossils are important for understanding the early histories of modern mammalian orders.

The fossils were collected between the 1950s and 1990s by teams led by Drs. William D. Turnbull and John J. Flynn. Collecting in the field outpaced processing back at the museum, such that unopened cans and bags of fossils accumulated over the years to fill rows of cabinets.

Our curatorial team, which included student interns and citizen volunteers, worked hard to harness the scientific value of all this material by identifying, cataloging, and conserving thousands of specimens. This effort dramatically expanded our knowledge of the mammals that had lived in the basin, and allowed us to ask important questions like "How do regional mammalian faunas respond to climate change over millions of years?" (Tomiya et al., 2021).