<county number>-T-<site number>
When geo-referencing you will often encounter locality numbers of the form 122-T-13. These specific NPL sites are recorded in card files in the curator's office. You may see these locations for other states and those cards in also in the curator's office. (As of July, 2019, in card drawers to the left of the exit door on the north end of the office.)
I can be important to go look at these if you are having trouble tracking one of these down, for several reasons.
- Typos - People make mistakes. They miss-interpret abbreviations. They conflate formation with locations.
- Duplication - For some localities there are multiple cards, some with additional data, some with original data crossed out or edited. I have found as many as four cards for a single location.
- County numbering errors - At one point the numbering scheme changed. You will find cards with the original number crossed out and one that differs by one added in. Some of these older numbers made it into the database and thus the county is wrong. Sometimes this is apparent in the database itself - e.g. when a coastal county shows a Paleozoic fossil or formation. These can be gnarly to unravel and I usually try to confirm with someone else if I'm making a change like this. And, I record in the remarks the old entry and a rationale.
Other Location Numbers - 52.4, 904, K200, 201TX
Some of these, especially those like 52.4, come from lists of locations in older publications or collections. Found Places contains some links to disambiguating these.
The Rio Bravo collection (with specimen numbers beginning with 'R') use the following abbreviations:
- K - Cretaceous (not to be confused with specimen numbers starting with 'K' from the King collection
- T- Tertiary
- KX - Cretaceous, Mexico
- TX - Tertiary, Mexico (potentially very confusing)
- X - Mexico locations
I think I have seen these with the abbreviation at the end, e.g. 202TX. With some specimen numbers appended. Eg. 202TX401. I'm not sure of the order of location vs. specimen #. This needs to be confirmed.
NPL, BEG, P, K
Most of what you will see uses one of the above labels. But there are others.