Catalogue of Life
This is a landing page that describes what the Catalogue of Life is and why it is important in the context of paleo data. You can dive deeper via the links to related resources aggregated here.
Catalogue of LifeA resource designed to compile and share the most complete authoritative list of the world’s species, as maintained by hundreds of global taxonomists. (COLCatalogue of Life. A resource designed to compile and share the most complete authoritative list of the world’s species, as maintained by hundreds of global taxonomists.) is a collaboration that produces a resource for sharing and discovering digital taxonomic information across the tree of life. COL serves as the main taxonomic backbone for systems like GBIFGlobal Biodiversity Information Facility. International network and data infrastructure providing open access to biodiversity data, including fossils.. Data is sourced from experts, and ranges in scale from checklists compiled and published by individuals or research groups, to large taxonomic projects and aggregators, such as WoRMSWorld Register of Marine Species. Authoritative taxonomy database for global marine species..
Coverage of fossil taxa is highly variable, and mostly comes from data about a few extinct groups pulled from the Paleobiology DatabaseGlobal, community-driven database of fossil occurrence records supported by literature.. Input is needed from paleontologists to help expand this coverage. Expanded coverage for fossil taxa in COL would have positive downstream effects on the discoverability of fossil specimen data in global aggregators such as GBIF.
Taxonomic resource with highly variable coverage for fossils.
Metadata record last updated on 2025-07-09Related content
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