Paleontologists, professionals and amateurs, often are specialists. They study fossils belonging to a limited number of families or coming from certain regions and/or of a certain age. They have to specialize, geological history is long, the number of fossils is infinite and the Earth as a whole is simply too big. At the same time, universities in a lot of countries are closing their paleontological faculties, libraries and museums because they have to deal with decreasing budgets. As a consequence paleontologists are becoming an endangered species. Paleontological knowledge becomes scarce, difficult to reach, vulnerable and vanishes into the thin air as their owners retire or die. So we have to protect and conserve what we know by bringing it together and sharing it with each other. That's the idea behind FossilBase, an open knowledge base for paleontological interested people, that provides a tool to work through data brought together and stored by its members, with the sole intention to educate.
FossilBase wants to offer the opportunity to identify fossils to everyone. Its database is, certainly at this moment (autumn 2007) immature and will always be incomplete, as new fossils are found every day. But the chance of getting a correct identification will increase when the number of records in the database grows. We hope to motivate a lot of people to store their particular paleontological knowledge.
The use of FossilBase is free to everyone, but to add information you have to become a member of the FossilBase team. Applying for membership is easy and in principle open to everyone who wants to share our goals. Just register yourself by using the registration form appearing after clicking on the registration button. You can choose your own log-in name and password. After sending the form you will receive an e-mail with a link to complete your registration. The admin will set your rights (this unfortunately may take some time, but is meant to prevent the abuse of membership). You will recieve a confirmation by e-mail. After that you have become a member of the FossilBase team. This gives you the right to log in and add records to the FossilBase database. You will also receive the possibility to update records, but this right is limited to those who are your 'own', in other words the ones you added previously. So other members, with the exception of the admin and group admin, cannot change 'your' records. More information about the use of FossilBase is available from the user and member guides, downloadable as a .pdf files. See the button 'downloads' in the menu at the left side of this page. There you will also find the button 'Team' with behind it more information about the FossilBase organization and its members.
