Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology (ca. 50 Volumes) Migrated to a Flexible Online Database

The Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology is the encyclopedic resource providing expert-vetted data on taxonomy, stratigraphy, biogeography, morphology, geologic age span, ecology and evolution of major fossil invertebrate and microfossil phyla. More than 50 volumes containing > 30,000 pages and 12,000 figures produced by hundreds of paleontologists of this global standard have been published since 1953 and updates appear regularly. These are available as open access PDFs and house a tremendous wealth of data relevant for scientific studies. However, data in PDFs are hard to extract. The Treatise team worked with computer-engineering students at Purdue University, who in turn worked with the AI-team at GeoGPT to extract and organize all the information and images from the main 40 volumes into an online, easily updatable, user-friendly database that meets FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) standards. This database currently includes details on about 35,000 invertebrate genera; and most include figures and links to the details on the higher levels of their hierarchy. All AI-generated entries and figure captions were verified by geologists against the original publications. One challenge was the use of many non-standardized regional geologic age assignments in the Treatise, especially the older entries. To address this, extensive age-unit conversion tables automated the assignments to the corresponding modern international chronostratigraphic units and associated Myr. In turn, this enables diversity-through-time curves of the genera within each clade, such as brachiopods, graptolites, bivalves and trilobites (and smaller subclades within each), to be auto-displayed or downloaded. The fossil fields in independent open-access relational databases on global geologic formations automatically link to the detailed information and imagery on genera in the Treatise; and the diversity curve can be migrated with one-click to display against other time-calibrated information on Earth history and plate reconstructions using the online TimeScale Creator system. The array of Treatise databases can be freely accessed at https://treatise.geolex.org; but will be soon officially hosted on the website of the Paleontological Institute.