Is there a website or other resource that catalogs all fossils ever found? Basically, is there a literal "Fossil Record"?
Where do scientists gather their results from excavations? Are they just scattered in various peer-reviewed papers in science journals?
I'm imagining something like manuscripts and master texts. You have some researchers who analyze manuscripts to produce the text of that manuscript in electronic form, for instance. Then, other researchers take these various readings and assemble a master text, taking into account the variations and attempting to recover the original work.
By analogy, this would be like when a paleontologist at a dig site submits a paper about his/her findings to a science journal. Is there another group of scientists who look at all of these papers and compile a "master text" of the fossil record?