Numbering Schemes for Locations and Specimens

<county number>-T-<site number>

When geo-referencing you will often encounter locality numbers of the form 122-T-13. These specific NPL sites are recorded in card files in the curator's office. You may see these locations for other states and those cards in also in the curator's office. (As of July, 2019, in card drawers to the left of the exit door on the north end of the office.)

I can be important to go look at these if you are having trouble tracking one of these down, for several reasons.

Typos - People make mistakes. They miss-interpret abbreviations. They conflate formation with locations.
Duplication - For some localities there are multiple cards, some with additional data, some with original data crossed out or edited. I have found as many as four cards for a single location.
County numbering errors - At one point the numbering scheme changed. You will find cards with the original number crossed out and one that differs by one added in. Some of these older numbers made it into the database and thus the county is wrong. Sometimes this is apparent in the database itself - e.g. when a coastal county shows a Paleozoic fossil or formation. These can be gnarly to unravel and I usually try to confirm with someone else if I'm making a change like this. And, Iit is critical to record in the remarks the old entry and a rationale.

Other Location Numbers - 52.4, 904, K200, 201TX

Some of these, especially those like 52.4, come from lists of locations in older publications or collections. Found Places contains some links to disambiguating these.

The Rio Bravo collection (with specimen numbers beginning with 'R') use the following abbreviations:

K - Cretaceous (not to be confused with specimen numbers starting with 'K' from the King collection
T- Tertiary
KX - Cretaceous, Mexico
TX - Tertiary, Mexico (potentially very confusing)
X - Mexico locations

I think I have seen these with the abbreviation at the end, e.g. 202TX. With some specimen numbers appended. Eg. 202TX401. I'm not sure of the order of location vs. specimen #. This needs to be confirmed.

Specimen Numbers: NPL, BEG, P, K, etc

Most of what you will see in the way of specimen numbers uses one of the labels below.

NPL - Current NPL numbering scheme.
NPL-lastname - I have seen these, but I think they only occur in Alt Numbers. E.g. NPL-McCall, NPL-Garvie, NPL-Elliott, ...
BEG - Bureau of Economic Geology Collection
P - Plummer Collection.
UT - Originally collected by members of the UT Dept. of Geological Sciences. Inclues the Changegrain Eocene collection.
WSA - W. S. Adkins collection.
K - R. H. King Collection.
OMB - O. M. Ball collection, mostly Eocene plant material
R - Rio Bravo Collection. From the Rio Bravo Oil Company.

When we get donations from collectors, they normally have some scheme. As these are catalogued they are given NPL numbers, with the collector's original number in the Alternate Numbers field.