Collection Strengths

The fossil fish collection includes important holdings in Devonian fishes, Carboniferous fishes, and Mesozoic fishes from the Central Great Plains.  We have an emeritus Curator  (H. -P. Schultze) helping with that collection.

The Amphibian collections hold important Carboniferous material.  Dr. John Chorn, a research affiliate helps with this collection.

The reptile collection has important Carboniferous material and is also strong in Marine Cretaceous reptiles.  It also includes an important dinosaur collection from the Jurassic that has been or is the subject of three masters and one doctorial study. 

The fossil bird collection is supported by some 800 comparative casts and is one of the most useful study collections in the world.  It is visited yearly by a wide variety of outside researchers.

As an overall resource, the small mammal collection is probably the best resource of its kind in the world.  In fact, the strength of the vertebrate paleontology collection is heavily skewed towards Cenozoic mammals and in particular the Plio-Pleistocene. 

The Natural Trap Cave collection is one of the most important Late Pleistocene collections and is heavily used.  The usefulness of the fossil mammal collection as a teaching and research tool is greatly enhanced by an enormous collection of several thousand critical fossil casts.

Type Specimens

About 550 type specimens are in the collection, including holotypes and paratypes. Four volumes of “Type and Figured Specimens of Fossil vertebrate in the Collection of the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History” have been published as “Miscellaneous Publications”: Part I: Fossil Fishes (No. 73), Part II: Fossil Amphibians and Reptiles (No. 77), Part III: Fossil Birds (No. 78), Part IV: Fossil Mammals (No. 79). They include information on the specimen’s KUVP catalog number, geological age, locality, original collector(s), collecting date, original name, describer(s) and date of description, and original reference for the description.