Paleontology is a global science, with researchers all over the world striving to understand more With over 150,000 fossil specimens, many of them representing extinct species found nowhere else, the Alf Museum is a critical resource. However, not every researcher who wants to study our specimens can get to the museum. Thanks to the expansion of digital scanning and archiving, Alf Museum specimens are more accessible than ever before.

It doesn't look like much to the untrained eye, but a tiny tooth from Utah yielded some big information to researchers from the Alf Museum and The Webb Schools. A five millimeter-long premolar collected on a 2006 Alf Museum expedition turns out to be the first specimen of the rare fossil mammal Kimbetohia (pronounced "kim-buh-TOY-uh") from Utah. Kimbetohia is an extinct mammal called a multituberculate, and only a handful of specimens are known previously from New Mexico, Montana, and possibly Colorado. Additionally, the fossil helps to more certainly establish the uncertain age of rocks exposed in this part of Utah, to between 65.3 and 64.3 million years ago.