The CURATOR Project                                                                     Sample site

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Young Forest Company, a niche provider in the field of applied taxonomy and systematics, released The CURATOR Project: Key to the Sharks & Rays of the World, by Robert George Sprackland, Ph.D., in mid 1999.  Students of ichthyology, from amateur to specialist, will now have the tool to allow identification of any species of elasmobranch fish from anywhere in the world. This single, illustrated CD-ROM will replace the need for the expensive and often unavailable publications that are now required to do the same job. The CURATOR Project: Key to the Sharks & Rays of the World is truly global, covering every elasmobranch fish described as of 1 June 1998.

CURATOR is a user friendly, completely interactive set of dichotomous keys, each taxonomic level directly linked to the next. The user may begin the identification process at the ordinal, familial, or generic levels. At each step, a couplet of questions will appear, and by clicking on the more appropriate of these, be taken to the next couplet until identification of the shark or ray has been accomplished.

The CURATOR Project: Sharks & Rays of the World presents a variety of supplemental information to facilitate use and understanding of the key. Included are introductions to elasmobranchs, taxonomy, classification, and the use of keys. A glossary is accompanied by a bibliography that includes technical and general resource references. There is also a list of elasmobranch-related web sites. The bibliography and websites allow access to Internet sites to order books or contact elasmobranch researchers.

Anyone interested in sharks, skates, rays, sawfishes, and guitarfishes will benefit from The CURATOR Project: Sharks & Rays of the World. Students from third grade through college biology will learn to use dichotomous keys. Commercial fishermen and fisheries monitoring agents will have a single global resource that will make required species identifications possible. Law enforcement and curatorial researchers will be able to quickly confirm the identity of any elasmobranch in the world. Many groups, including rays, will be keyed in their entirety for the first time.

The last such attempt at collecting all the data on the world’s elasmobranchs was published by Harvard's Prof. Samuel Garman in 1913, and he left many difficult groups without keys. Since then, the number of species recognized by science has more than doubled, making the need for a single source, globally applicable key particularly important.

The CURATOR Project: key to the sharks & Rays of the World has been compiled by Dr. Robert George Sprackland, chairman of Young Forest Company and Director of the Virtual Museum of Natural History. He is a research associate in zoology at the National Museums of Scotland, and is a systematic zoologist who has nearly thirty years’ experience as a museum-based taxonomist. Dr. Sprackland, who earned his Ph.D. at University College London (the University of London) is a Fellow of the Linnean and Zoological Societies of London, and a member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and the American Elasmobranch Society.  

The consulting ichthyologist is Geoffrey N. Swinney, Curator of Lower Vertebrates at the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh. Mr. Swinney is a trustee of the British Shark Trust. 

The project enjoys the artistic talents of noted artist/illustrator 
Richard Ellis, and the pen-and-ink renderings of Diana Carlson-Sherbo.

Much of the research collation and preliminary key design was done 
by Artha Smith. Ms. Smith, who obtained her B.S. in Biology from the 
College of Notre Dame in 1999.