Despite being a field of such diversity, geology and its disciplines have been traditionally dominated by men. Women made early contributions to the field inside-and-out of academia, but were denied professional positions for decades. While there has been progress made to the position and representation of women in geology, the foundation for this transformation in the geological sciences over the last 200 years began, in part, with women in scientific illustration.

The Cincinnati Dry Dredgers – a group of amateur paleontologists and geologists that have collected fossils and studied paleontology in the region for over 80 years – chose five candidates for the official Cincinnati fossil.

Encrusted fossil specimens are important because they provide direct evidence of species interaction at a single point in geological time. With this information, paleontologists can reconstruct community composition, the ecological roles of various fossil organisms and the biological implications of such interactions.