North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (NCMNS), the largest natural history museum in the southeastern United States, will expand participatory paleontology programs that connect middle school classrooms directly with museum research and collections. The project will integrate and scale two successful programs—Cretaceous Creatures (CC) and Shark Tooth Forensics (STF)—to increase access to authentic scientific experiences for teachers and students, including those in rural and remote communities. This project will standardize and centralize CC and STF through a unified online platform that includes a teacher portal, interactive species-identification modules using high-resolution 3D fossil scans, standardized lesson plans aligned with Next Generation Science Standards, and improved systems for student data collection and validation. Over the project period, approximately 160 teachers and more than 15,000 students will participate in authentic scientific research. Students are expected to discover and document roughly 12,000 vertebrate fossils that will become part of the museum's research collections, generating new biodiversity datasets. The primary beneficiaries of this project are eighth grade students and teachers across the country. Project outcomes include improving science literacy and access among American middle school students.