Kiera D. Crowley

Saving the Museum After years of financial troubles and millions of funds raised in support, the Museum of the Earth is still struggling to bridge its multi-million dollar budgetary gap. It needs to

Update on the Paleontological Research Institution and their remaining need for donations to pay off their mortgage and avoid foreclosure
#savePRI please share; tag anyone you think might help🧪⚒️🦑

@lastweektonight.com @colbertlateshow.bsky.social @pbseons.bsky.social

www.ithaca.com/news/regiona...

Paleogeographic map showing hypothesized early Danian ocean currents and zoogeographic provinces.

We find that the Brightseat snails are indicative of overlapping influence from both northern and southern Danian zoogeographic provinces, though its composition appears more closely allied with faunas from Greenland and northwestern Europe.

The Brightseat gastropod fauna is well suited for transatlantic comparison, and is intermediate in geographic position between other well-studied assemblages including those from the Gulf Coastal Plain, western Greenland, and northwestern Europe.

This monograph describes 52 gastropods, including 25 new species/subspecies, from the Brightseat Formation of Maryland, which represents the earliest Paleocene sediments which crop out in this region of the northern Atlantic Coastal Plain.

Cover image of the latest issue of the journal Bulletins of American Paleontology, showing species of Danian gastropods from Maryland.

Incredibly proud to see this project hit the light of day! Begun in the 1980s as the M.S. research of D. Govoni, I've led the charge with Dave the past few years to revise and expand his unpublished thesis and ensure that this diverse gastropod fauna received the formal description it deserved. 🧵

⚒️ New paper out in Paleobiology with Aaron Goodman, W. Allmon, @crowleyk.bsky.social, A. Farnsworth, M. Hopkins, D. Lunt, and Cori Myers:
Global climate model comparisons of niche evolution in turritelline gastropods across the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Another day in the field with the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History team on Anticosti Island. Here, Lena and I are joined by OU Geosciences grad students Kiera Crowley (Wright lab) and Alysha Zazubec (Cole lab)

Sign for "Marvelous Mollusks", an exhibit at the Museum of the Earth. Font has a distinct traveling show/circus feel to it, and the color palette is vivid.

This new exhibit at PRI's Museum of the Earth lives up to its name, with an amazing spread of modern and fossil specimens.

You’ve heard of elf on a shelf… but what about John Oliver on a PRI Tully Monster?

John Oliver in a suit and tie coming out of the aperture of a fossil snail on a black sand background.

Day 1 of photoshopping John Oliver onto/into fossils in the hopes that he saves my old museum, the Paleontological Research Institution

I think he makes a great snail!

Fossil is the Murex shilhoensis type, a junior synonym of Favartia shilohensis, comedian is H. sapiens

#savepri #Museumofthearth

Donation spike gives Museum of the Earth new life but future remains uncertain - The Ithaca Voice ITHACA, N.Y. — Following a surge of donations sparked by The Ithaca Voice’s reporting, the Museum of the Earth — one of the last natural history museums in upstate New […]

For #fossilfriday please share this updated article about efforts to save PRI.🦑🧪⚒️

In addition to an anonymous $1 million donation PRI has raised approximately $1.1 million towards the remaining mortgage and needs another $2.2 by year end to be free of the liability

ithacavoice.org/2025/04/dona...

As a curator at a natural history museum, I'm gutted to learn about the dismantling of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. If anything, we need to fund, protect and preserve museum collections and uphold institutions of scientific and cultural knowledge now more than ever.

Donate — Paleontological Research Institution

Every donation, no matter the size, helps in the short-medium term as we work to save the Institution: www.priweb.org/donate

More info on PRI's website here: www.priweb.org/press-releas...

Financial peril could doom a famed New York paleontological institute “Exceptional” fossil collections housed by the Paleontological Research Institute risk being orphaned

New article by @science.org on the financial crisis at PRI.

PRI has played an invaluable role in my personal growth as an academic paleontologist and Earth science educator. We *must* preserve organizations with such long-standing commitments to science education and wise stewardship of the planet.

Museum of the Earth faces extinction under “imminent” threat of foreclosure - The Ithaca Voice ITHACA, N.Y. — The Museum of the Earth, one of the last natural history museums in Upstate New York, faces an imminent threat of foreclosure after a group of donors […]

Detailed article about PRI and the Museum of the Earth's current struggles. If the museum closes it may be the largest collection dispersed/lost in the US (with 7 million specimens it is one of the 10 largest in the US).
⚒️🧪🦑
Please share widely and help if you can!
ithacavoice.org/2025/01/muse...

I do not… I just stumbled across it. Can’t seem to find a definitive answer online either. But if some critical mass of gastropod enthusiasts have decided to endorse such an annual holiday, who am I to argue?!