Date (Creation)

2026-07-27

Citation identifier

http://data.bgs.ac.uk/id/dataHolding/13608749

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Distributor
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Point of contact
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Distributor
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Point of contact

Maintenance and update frequency

As needed

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

• Geology

BGS Thesaurus of Geosciences

• Palaeontology

• Biostratigraphy

• Geological surveys

• Fossils

• Type specimen

• Sampling

• Specimen collecting

• Fossil specimen

dataCentre

• UK Location (INSPIRE)

Keywords

• NERC_DDC

Access constraints

Other restrictions

Other constraints

The precise locations of certain specimen localities is confidential, so locations are rounded to the nearest 100 m in the publicly available version. Samples known to have come from confidential boreholes are also excluded.

Use constraints

Other restrictions

Other constraints

The copyright of materials derived from the British Geological Survey's work is vested in the Natural Environment Research Council [NERC]. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a retrieval system of any nature, without the prior permission of the copyright holder, via the BGS Intellectual Property Rights Manager. Use by customers of information provided by the BGS, is at the customer's own risk. In view of the disparate sources of information at BGS's disposal, including such material donated to BGS, that BGS accepts in good faith as being accurate, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) gives no warranty, expressed or implied, as to the quality or accuracy of the information supplied, or to the information's suitability for any use. NERC/BGS accepts no liability whatever in respect of loss, damage, injury or other occurence however caused.

Other constraints

Available under the Open Government Licence subject to the following acknowledgement accompanying the reproduced NERC materials "Contains NERC materials ©NERC [year]"

Spatial representation type

Vector

Distance

100  urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001

Language

English

Topic category

• Geoscientific information

Geographic identifier

GBN

ISO 3166_2 2009 revision

Geographic identifier

GREAT BRITAIN [id=139600]

British Geological Survey Gazetteer: Geographical hierarchy from Geosaurus 1979 creation

Begin date

1850 Before

Supplemental Information

The index was constructed in 2026 by cleaning and exporting data in the Oracle tables BGS.FOSSIL_LOCALITY (mostly Scottish specimens) and BGS.NEW_REGISTRATION (mostly English / Welsh specimens). Because index is static and is not live-linked to the database, however, the underlying tables are updated only irregularly. Specimens which are known to be derived from confidential boreholes have been excluded from the public version.

Unique resource identifier

OSGB 1936 / British National Grid (EPSG::27700)

Unique resource identifier

WGS 84 (EPSG::4326)

Distribution format

Name	Version
ESRI Shapefile (.shp)

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Distributor

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Geological Survey	Enquiries	enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link	https://www.bgs.ac.uk/geological-data/national-geological-repository/palaeontology-collections/	Palaeontology and biostratigraphy collections

Hierarchy level

Dataset

Other

dataset

Statement

This static dataset was created in 2026 by processing and combining pre-existing digital spatial indexes containing fossil specimen metadata. The original digital indexes themselves largely were digitised from paper records before the year 2000. Because of the long history over which samples have been collected, the metadata are incomplete in places.

Metadata

File identifier

5798eb74-7bae-13d4-e063-3050940adf8b XML

Metadata language

English

Hierarchy level

Dataset

Date stamp

2026-08-11

Metadata standard name

UK GEMINI

Metadata standard version

2.3

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
British Geological Survey		enquiries@bgs.ac.uk	Point of contact

Dataset URI

http://data.bgs.ac.uk/id/dataHolding/13608749