The NOW (Neogene of the Old World) database contains information about Eurasian Miocene to Pleistocene land mammal taxa and localities, with emphasis on the European Miocene and Pliocene. The NOW database is maintained and coordinated at the University of Helsinki by Mikael Fortelius in collaboration with an international advisory board.

The nucleus of the database is a locality table and a species table, relationally linked by means of a locality-species correlation table (in essence, a table of localities and their faunal lists). Additions and updates are tied to references. Each species (including higher taxa such as "Machairodontini indet. large sp." or "Rhinocerotidae indet. indet.") is given certain attributes describing anatomy and inferred diet, locomotion and other properties. Similarly, the geographic location, age, stratigraphy, lithology, taphonomy and environmental interpretation of each locality is described.

A workshop organised by Ray Bernor, Volker Fahlbusch and Siegfried Rietschel in 1992 at Schloss Reisensburg in Bavaria, Germany was the starting point in the development of NOW. Participants in the workshop had been requested to compile revised lists of taxa and localities, to provide a database for later distribution within the group. The purpose of the workshop was to review the evidence for provinciality and diachrony of change between Central Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean realm during the Middle and Late Miocene. From this core dataset NOW has since expanded to cover most of the Eurasian continent for the post-Oligocene (ca 25-0.01 million years ago). A main source of coordinated data input and revision was the European Science Foundation Network on Hominoid Evolution and Environmental Change in the Neogene of Europe (1995-1998). Not all datasets that have been added to NOW are of equal quality, however, and users must be aware of this fact. Revision of the data by NOW advisory board members and all users is an ongoing process and an integral part of the NOW project.

Citation

The NOW Database should be cited as follows: Fortelius, M. (coordinator) [year]. Neogene of the Old World Database of Fossil Mammals (NOW). University of Helsinki. http://www.helsinki.fi/science/now/.

In published research using NOW data, please indicate which version of the database was used. For example, "NOW public release 030717" or "dataset downloaded Dec. 1, 2005".