Saturday, November 24, 2007

Don't lose that folklore!

Here's a cautionary tale about about "folklore"—information in organizations that is not collected, but held only informally and by individuals. Speaking of "rescuer" professionals, someone who had set a content management system or a good policy for capturing scientific & intellectual property would have saved the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto both embarrassment and money.

The ROM has a new display hall for its dinosaur fossils. The new curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, who just started this year, was told that he could go out and get a big one. While researching in the U.S., he found a reference to a really big skeleton that the ROM already had—but nobody back home knew about it.

Thirty years ago, the museum traded for a large dinosaur skeleton, but there was no room to set it up. Over the years, the bones were stored separately and everyone forgot about them—except for the old curator, but he retired and eventually died. If it weren't for an obscure reference in an old book, the bones might never have been recognized for what they are.

I think that there's a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment for the museum in finding that they have a large Barosaurus specimen that is more complete than most. It is being lovingly assembled, the missing parts duplicated if left-right or copied from other specimens, and will be put on display by December 15. It's particularly nice since the museum has specimens of the other kinds of large dinosaurs, but until now had not had a diplodocus type—that they knew of. Think how much better their planning would be if they had known what they had.

(The sketch of Barosaurus is from Wikipedia commons. I re-worked this article from an original on my Science Notes blog: "ROM finds skeleton in its closet." I hope I've improved it.)