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A major digitization project at CU �鶹ӰԺ’s Natural History Museum is helping researchers around the world collaborate like never before

Imagine being able to see the hairs on a 45-million-year-old fly. Without a microscope. In a lab 5,000 miles away from the museum where it’s stored.��

Public images with that level of detail are the result of a major digitization project that has been going on at��CU �鶹ӰԺ’s Museum of Natural History for more than a decade. The museum team has been diligently snapshotting and recording data about the museum’s collections, then sharing them to open-source databases that are available to researchers around the world. These efforts, which span the Museum’s collections departments, reflect a shared commitment to making specimens and data more accessible for researchers around the world.

The museum’s Paleontology Department, specifically, has shared more than 1 million specimen records to the�� (GBIF)—many with high-resolution images to accompany them—from across the museum’s collections.��

“It’s been really key to getting our collection used more,” says��Talia Karim, collections manager of invertebrate paleontology at the museum. “We’ve had graduate students in other countries find those images on GBIF and then request higher-resolution images they can publish in a paper.”

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As collections manager of invertebrate paleontology, Talia Karim has led major projects to digitize the museum’s fossil collections and publish the resulting data so it can be used by researchers around the world. (Photo: Patrick Campbell/CU �鶹ӰԺ)

The project was made possible through the National Science Foundation’s�� funding opportunity, which was designed to advance scientific knowledge by improving access to digitized information in U.S. collections.��

Now, with the help of a new grant, Karim is working with end users to refine their data output and make sure it’s as usable as possible for people looking to leverage these collections.��

To that end, this April, Karim and her team hosted a workshop at CU, gathering paleontology collections managers from around the country, many of whom received funding from the ADBC grant to digitize their own collections.��

“We brought all these people together to talk about what’s next,” says Karim. “How can we keep working together to digitize more data or improve the quality of the data to make sure it’s being used?”��

The digitization process��

With the help of CU graduate students, and some high-tech imaging systems, there are now nearly 57,000 invertebrate fossil records on GBIF that feature two-dimensional images, alongside information about the fossil’s geologic and geographic contexts.��

Capturing those images requires a multi-step process. “We're putting a specimen under the camera, and then we're taking images at multiple focal depths,” says Karim. “Then we merge those so that you have a very small thing that's totally in focus in a 2D image.”��

Because these are fossils, and don’t have any genetic data to share, researchers need to have a crisp, clear view of the specimen’s morphology in order for the fossil to be useful.��

“That’s why it’s important to have those really in-focus, high-resolution photographs,” says Karim. “And some of the morphology on the fossil insects is incredibly preserved. You can see all the venation on the wings of a dragonfly. Or you can zoom in on a fly and see all these little hairs. And they're 45 million years old!”��

Karim’s team made use of two NSF grants,�� and��, to document not only the Museum’s fossil insect collections but also its Cretaceous Western Interior Seaway fossil collection, which features ammonites and clams that were left behind when Colorado was underwater 100 million years ago.

Putting data to good use

Now that those specimens are available on GBIF, they’re facilitating a lot more research connections. Last year Karim was contacted by a French graduate student who had discovered a fossilized ancient sawfly that was first discovered in Colorado’s Florissant Formation and is now part of the museum’s collections.��

“He found more things he wanted to work on, and then he shared it with his lab mate, and his lab mate found things in our collection,” says Karim. “But as grad students, they weren’t going to come all the way here from France to look at one specimen.” Instead, Karim’s team was able to use their imaging equipment to take whatever custom high-resolution images they needed.��

Karim also points out that having data from a huge number of specimens allows for a more automated aggregation of data to answer big questions about, say, global species distributions through time.

This image of an ancient picture-winged fly was taken from the museum’s fossil insect collections and is just one of more than a million entries CU has submitted to the�� database. (Photo: CU Museum of Natural History)

"Museum collections allow us to ask questions that span hundreds of millions of years, revealing how life evolved and how ecosystems responded to a changing world,” says��Carl Simpson, associate professor of earth science.��

“Digitization allows those collections to power the science of the future,” Simpson adds. “And then by combining museum collections with artificial intelligence, we can accelerate the pace of biodiversity and evolutionary research."

In that vein, Simpson is leveraging the stellar imagery Karim’s team created, along with AI, to identify characteristics in bryozoans, a phylum of simple, aquatic invertebrate animals that he studies. “AI gives us new tools to ask questions at a scale that would have been impossible only a few years ago,” Simpson says.��

Fine tuning their output

As co-PI of their current grant, Simpson is serving as a sort of end user test case for Karim’s team to see how the data is being used. But Karim is also gathering input from everyone involved in the process through a series of workshops.��

The most recent workshop was the third such gathering planned to help execute Karim’s current�� grant. The first, which took place in 2024, included paleontologists and researchers who helped Karim’s team determine how their digitized files could be more useful. “We asked, have we digitized the kinds of things that they need for their research?” Karim says. “Can they retrieve the kind of information that they need for their research? What’s missing?”

In 2025, the workshop brought together people who develop cyber-infrastructure tools for databases like GBIF. They shared some researcher feedback and asked them how they might address that feedback from an IT perspective to ensure their systems are actually user friendly. (Karim adds that often in academia systems get built without ever talking to the people who are using what's being built. “So, we're trying to bridge that gap a little bit!”)��

Before Karim’s grant wraps up next spring, she and her team will integrate learnings from these information-gathering sessions into a “Paleo Data Roadmap,” featuring recommendations for developers of cyber infrastructure or data standards about how to increase data usability.

Karim looks forward to the increased connections—not just with her fellow collections managers, but from researchers around the world—that have resulted from their digitization efforts. “I love seeing the types of research that people are doing,” she says. “And I also really like helping people with their research. That makes me very happy.”

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