JPaleoDB: One-Stop Search for Japan's Paleontological Collections

Abstract

The Japan Paleobiology Database (jPaleoDB)*1*2 is a portal website for one-stop searching of paleontological specimens housed in museums across Japan. It contains data for over 430,000 specimen records from 50 museums and institutions as of July 2024 (Table 1). These records include over 7,000 holotypes, more than 100,000 voucher specimens, and represent over 13,000 genera in the Animalia kingdom, over 1,100 genera in the Plantae kingdom, and over 980 genera from other groups. This portal site allows users to search for paleontological specimens from various museums simultaneously, eliminating the need to navigate individual museum databases with different formats and search systems. Search results provide users with detailed information about each specimen, including scientific name, locality, repository, catalog number, type status, and publication. Additionally, results link directly to the corresponding specimen page on each museum's website. jPaleoDB's mission is to establish a network that facilitates the use of paleontological specimens in Japan for research and education. It has further expanded to support curatorial work in each museum by digitizing catalogs to create datasets of currently hidden paleontological collections. jPaleoDB is a research project built and operated by a group of individual researchers from universities and museums, not by a large organization like a national agency or academic society. Integrating data from museums that house specimens is challenging due to the difficulty of automation. As a result, much of the data requires manual curation. In addition, data for voucher specimens described in publications (paleontological papers, illustrated books, catalogs) are incorporated into jPaleoDB by analyzing publicly available resources and examining actual specimens at museums. Because of these reasons, jPaleoDB is still under development. We believe this portal site will be valuable for exploring the comprehensive record of paleontological specimens in Japan and helping users locate specific specimens of interest.