The NOW database of fossil mammals came to be through a confluence of several initiatives spanning multiple decades. The first public version of NOW database was released in 1996 and the first Advisory Board was established the year after. Originally, NOW stood for Neogene of the Old World but with the gradual expansion of the database the acronym was eventually reassigned to stand for New and Old Worlds. The structure of what would become NOW was originally cloned from the ETE database of the Smithsonian Institution and the first NOW version accessible over the internet was a node of the ETE database. The first standalone, online version of NOW was launched in 2005 and the first formal steering group was established in 2009. During its existence, NOW has been funded, directly or indirectly, by several organizations but fundamentally it has always been an unfunded community effort, dependent on voluntary work by the participants.
In addition to the Academy of Finland we would like to acknowledge generous support from the European Science Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, the Finnish Museum of Natural History, the University of Helsinki, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Hanken School of Economics and the CSC – IT Center for Science. Our special gratitude goes to the Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation and Mrs. Elsa Fromond for the generous endowment that enabled, among other things, the establishment of a position at the Finnish Museum of Natural History that includes technical database coordination of NOW. This is R.L. Bernor’s NSF FuTRES publication 35.