VIRTUAL FOSSILS: Tres kewl.

In a simple table, under a bright light, the fossilized skull of a protoceratops is waiting for its close-up. Once the portrait is made by a high-resolution digital camera, it will take its place online with 8,000 other fossil images and more than 200,000 catalog entries of vertebrate and invertebrate fossils in the collection of the American Museum of Natural History.

And this is just the beginning.

The museum has two million to three million fossils (no one really knows how many), and sooner or later descriptions of all of them will appear online, many with photographs. And the fossils are not the half of it. In all, the museum has 30 million items -- bird and animal skins, pickled frogs, pre-Columbian pots, diaries, field journals and sketches of explorers and scientists who braved the midday sun and the polar nights. Four hundred thousand are now online.

So far, the museum has just scratched the surface of digitization, as the process is called, but the hope is to one day create a searchable online catalog of the whole museum, with images and text.

[...]

The goal, officials at several museums say, is to link many collections in cooperative databases. Ben Williams, the lead librarian at the Field Museum, said, "We're all heading toward a kind of digital global museum" — in effect, a catalog of the world.

Right now anyone with access to the Internet, whether a Ph.D. candidate or a seventh grader, can check the mammal collections of 17 museums at once on Manis, the Mammal Networked Information System.

Wowness! Read The Rest Scale: yeah, baby, yeah! But on MANIS, typically the Times doesn't provide a link. Amygdala does!

See also these links to some natural history museum online collections.