The temporality of specimens is an often overlooked but quintessential part of using aggregated biodiversity occurrences for research, especially when millions of these occurrences exist in deep time. Presently in Darwin Core, there are terms for describing the geological context of specimens, which is needed for paleontological specimens. However, information about the contextual absolute date associated with a specimen, and how that date was generated is not supported in Darwin Core, but would strongly enhance usability for research. Providers do occasionally try provisioning this information, but it is currently hidden in a few different Darwin Core fields, making it hard to discover and nearly impossible to search for in biodiversity portals. Here we provide an overview of where absolute date content for paleontological and archaeological specimens are currently found in published specimens records. We will then introduce a working Darwin Core extension that focuses on chronometric content, and demonstrate the use of this extension with published datasets from the zooarchaeological and paleontological communities. This new advancement will allow providers to make these crucial data available, researchers to easily find the temporal range associated with an occurrence, evaluate how this range was determined, and compile occurrences based on their shared ages to help streamline the research process.

Laura Brenskelle