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Scientific research on the Cibao Valley of the Dominican Republic began in the mid 1800's and has continued ever since. The first studies were very small in scope and involved single scientists rather than collaborative research efforts. In the 1850's a series of papers by G. B. Sowerby II (1850), Moore (1850), Lonsdale (1853), and Heneken (1853) described some of the first localities and fossil invertebrate species from the Cibao Valley . Work on these mollusks continued with Gabb (1873), Pilsbury and Johnson (1917) and Pilsbury (1922). But the most comprehensive work on the geology and fossils of the Cibao Valley in the early 20 th century was conducted by Carlotta Joaquin Maury. Her 1917 study is a classic reference that is still used today by DRP mollusk researchers. Maury conducted the first comprehensive study of the invertebrate animals of the Cibao Valley . She also revised estimates of the geological age of the sedimentary rocks and redefined the geological formations. Around the same time, T. W. Vaughan and his associates from the U.S. Geological Survey began a major stratigraphic study of the region (Vaughan et al. 1921). A series of other revisions of the ages and names of the rock layers were made by Maury (1929, 1931), Weyl (1940, 1966), Bermudez (1949), Butterlin (1954), Ramirez (1956), Van den Bold (1968, 1969), Bowin (1975), Seiglie (1978) and Dorreen (1979). In 1961, Pflug illustrated and updated the scientific names of many of the species descriptions of Dominican fossil mollusks. By the 1970's, Harold and Emily Vokes of Tulane University were working on the living and extinct mollusks of the Caribbean region (Vokes, 1979). Their field research efforts produced major new collections of mollusk material from the Cibao Valley and elsewhere in the Caribbean that are still of considerable importance to Dominican Republic researchers today. At the same time, unknown to the Vokeses, a group of European scientists were planning a large-scale research project to resample, map, and study the fossil rich sedimentary rocks of the Cibao Valley . The two groups joined forces in the late 1970's and collectively produced a wealth of data for scientific research.