Increased attention is being given to the preservation of paleontological sites, collections, and other archival resources that record stages in the history of the Earth's biota. The success of these efforts will be enhanced with greater recognition that the extant biota and its immediate past stages are part of a continuum (e.g., deep-time floras). An expected consequence of this view would be to bring identification of the fossil representatives under closer scrutiny by specialists in the extant lineages. Improvement in the quality and reliability of the paleontological database benefits the use of the information both in its biological applications (e.g., historical biogeography, calibration of molecular clocks, construction of area cladograms) and in geological investigations (e.g., paleoenvironmental reconstructions). Inherent in the increasing recognition of time as important in these considerations is continued access to the remarkably few fossil-bearing sites, especially in tropical America, that have provided virtually all of the existing museum specimens used in investigations for anchoring lineages in time and place. The destruction of these sites before additional collections can be made, and before they can be studied by modern methods of identification and interpretation, is an impediment to understanding the modern biota much like the destruction of sites with high concentrations of extant endemic taxa (hotspots). The relatively rare sites providing archival material for revealing the history of the Earth's vegetation should be relocated, studied more collaboratively by paleobotanists and taxonomists, and preserved. Preliminary efforts are underway to conserve three collection sites (San Sebastian flora, Puerto Rico; Sanchez flora, Dominican Republic; Yumarí flora, Cuba), and to develop a project whereby paleobotanists and taxonomists will work collaboratively to establish a reliable database of fossil material.