The URL paths described in this section provide access to information about the fossil specimens represented in the Paleobiology Database. These specimens may be selected by a variety of criteria including: name, location, age, enterer, and taxonomic identification.
Follow this link for more information on the use of taxonomic names in this data service.
The following URL paths are available:
| Single specimen |
This operation returns information about a single fossil specimen, identified either by name or by identifier. For example: |
| Add specimen records or update existing records |
This operation allows you to add new specimen and measurement records to the database and/or update the attributes of existing records. |
| Update existing specimen records |
This operation allows you to update existing specimen and measurement records |
| List of specimens |
This operation returns information about multiple specimens, selected according to the parameters you provide. Depending upon which output blocks you select, the response will contain some fields describing the specimens and some describing the occurrences and collections (if any) with which they are associated. For example: |
| Add measurement records or update existing records |
This operation allows you to add new specimen measurement records to the database and/or update the attributes of existing records. |
| Bibiographic references for specimens |
This operation returns information about the bibliographic references associated with fossil specimens. You can pass identical filtering parameters to specs/byref and to specs/refs, which will give you both a list of occurrences and a list of the associated references. |
| Specimens grouped by bibliographic reference |
This operation returns information about multiple specimens, selected with respect to some combination of the attributes of the occurrences and the attributes of the bibliographic reference(s) from which they were entered. You can use this operation in conjunction with specs/refs to show, for each selected reference, all of the specimens entered from it, or all which meet certain criteria. |
| Measurements of specimens |
This operation returns information about the measurements associated with selected specimens. |
| Specimen descriptive elements |
This operation returns lists of elements that can be used to describe specimens, for example 'bone', 'tooth', 'valve'. |
This service is provided by the Paleobiology Database, hosted by the Department of Geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
If you have questions about this data service, or wish to report a bug, please contact the database administrator at admin@paleobiodb.org