The fossil collections on display in some of the world’s most famous museums are just a fraction of what is hidden away, some of which haven’t been seen in decades. This has prompted scientists to develop a global digital museum.

Scientists from museums such as London’s Natural History Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. are attempting to digitize millions of fossil specimens currently in storage in these museums, a process that could take the Smithsonian alone 50 years to complete considering its warehouse of 40 million fossils.

According to the researchers, the digital museum will enable scientists the world over to study specimens, granting them access to the collective evidence of evolution and an understanding of how life works and changes.

Kathy Hollis, who is heading the project at the Smithsonian, explained, "We are trying to make our entire collection available digitally for researchers to use online from anywhere in the world.

"And we're pretty sure that this is the largest fossil collection in the world.

"We have over 40 million specimens in the collection — it records the entire history of life, so if it has a fossil representative, it's likely here within the collection."

In a paper published in the Royal Society journals Biology Letters, researchers detail the process for digitizing these collections, calling it the mobilizing of dark data. Such detail, according to the paper’s authors, would complement scientific understanding of how the environment has changed in the past, consequently informing scientists of future environmental change.

Yet, some researchers wonder if a digital fossil will be as valuable as the real thing, while participants of the project argue that digital records may even be more valuable due to the information gathered during the process, which includes key information such as species, age and location where the fossil was discovered. Once gathered, this type of data will be available online, accessible to other scientists and researchers.

Professor Emily Rayfield at the University of Bristol is able to access CT scans of dinosaur skulls as well as other bones so that she can construct computer models for the purpose of research.

"We can actually use the digital data to test how these animals functioned," she said.

Lifting the actual fossilized skull of a dinosaur presents too many risks. Not only is the specimen fragile and vulnerable to damage, it is difficult to lift for examination purposes. With the digitized data, Professor Rayfield is able to manipulate the digital dinosaur bones and simulate how the specimens might have moved and behaved. Professor Rayfield and her team made an interesting discovery about sauropods, which were related to and competed with the well-known diplodocus for food resources.

"People have wondered how an environment could possibly have supported and provided food for so many multi-tonne, plant-eating giants," she explained.

"One of the ideas has been that the differences in the neck length, the skull shape and the tooth shape enabled them to feed on different things.”

To demonstrate, one of Professor Rayfield’s students used digital data to rebuild each digital dinosaurs’ jaw muscles to determine how they would bite and chew their food.

"This showed that the different types of sauropods were indeed feeding in different ways and therefore probably on different types of food, which enabled the environment to sustain so many of these 10-plus tonne dinosaurs at once," Professor Rayfield concluded.

Another benefit of potentially great value is that a digital collection could keep data alive should a catastrophe ever destroy physical collections. A real-life example played out this past September at the Brazil National Museum, when fire destroyed much of that country’s historical archives.