The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), another Federal partner, has one of the largest paleontological collections in the United States. Overall, there are approximately forty million fossil animals (vertebrates and invertebrates) in the collections. Of these, approximately 224,000 are fossil insects, including 4,000 that are type specimens. Digitization of the fossil insect collections is at its very early stages, but an image gallery of outstanding Green River insects is already available via the museum’s website (http://paleobiology.si.edu/greenRiver/index.html). The NMNH and other
members of the Fossil Insect Collaborative TCN will work closely on digitization of all fossil insect specimens. Although not receiving funding from this proposed project, the collections team at NMNH (C. Labandeira, F. Marsh and K. Hollis) will be active participants in all TCN meetings and workshops. The group will collaborate with the NMNH group to acquire funding to support their collections digitizion and all NMNH specimens, associated metadata and images will be aggregated and distributed by iDigPaleo.