A multi-dimensional dataset of Ordovician to Silurian graptolite specimens for virtual examination, global correlation, and shale gas exploration

Abstract

Multi-elemental and multi-dimensional data are more and more important in the development of data-driven research, as is the case in modern paleontology, in which, in an examination by experts, or some day artificial intelligence, every fossil specimen plays a fundamental role. We here release a dataset of 1550 graptolite specimens representing 113 Ordovician to Silurian graptolite species or subspecies that are significant in global stratigraphic correlation and shale gas exploration. The dataset contains 2951 high-resolution images and a data table of each specimen's scientific information, including the taxonomic, geologic, and geographic information, comments, and references. Our dataset provides images for specialists or laypeople worldwide, is supported by the tool FSIDvis (Fossil Specimen Image Dataset Visualizer), which we developed to facilitate the interactive exploration of the rich-attribution image dataset, and includes a nonlinear-dimension reduction technique, t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding), to project image data into a two-dimensional space to visualize and explore the similarities. Our dataset potentially contributes to virtual examinations of specimens, global bio-stratigraphic correlation, and improvement of the shale gas exploration efficiency. All data, images and the spreadsheet are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6688670 (Xu, 2022).