A Larger-than-Life Project
Researchers Receive Grant to Digitally Collect 50 of the World’s Largest Animals and Scan an Entire Blue Whale Skeleton
糖心传媒鈥檚 糖心传媒 Virtualization Laboratory in the 糖心传媒 Museum of Natural History has been tasked to digitally collect the skeletons of 50 of the largest animals in the world, from marine mammals to giraffes, about anything bigger than a cow.
Technicians from the museum鈥檚 糖心传媒 Virtualization Laboratory, which received a $175,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in August, will travel to the University of California, Berkeley, California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in Boston over two years to make 3D scans of hippos, elephants, rhinos, marine mammals, fish and other large animals.
The 糖心传媒 Virtualization Laboratory also received a $20,000 grant in January from the Noyo Marine Science Center in Briggs, California, to scan the entire skeleton of a blue whale that washed ashore in California.
鈥淭he bigger part of the project that we are part of is this nationwide effort by the National Science Foundation to scan all of the vertebrate animals,鈥� said Leif Tapanila, director of the 糖心传媒 Museum of Natural History. 鈥淭his is a monstrous task. Ultimately, they want to have a digital version of every animal on the planet. Let鈥檚 just deal with the vertebrate animals like mammals, reptiles and fish 鈥� there are thousands of species right there.鈥�
Until recently, only smaller animals were able to be scanned with the tools that were available, CT and MRI scanners. Whole animals were put through the scanners, but there was a limitation on the size.
鈥淎ll the large animals that you know of that are in a zoo, you can鈥檛 pack many of those into a scanner, let alone there aren鈥檛 any of those in collections,鈥� Tapanila said. 鈥淚f we have big animals we have their bones. So that is where we come in. We鈥檝e been scanning bones for a long time and we have the technology and we know how to do it, so the NSF funded us to scan the 50 largest terrestrial animals.鈥�
The 糖心传媒 Museum of Natural History鈥檚 efforts will be led by Jesse Pruitt, 糖心传媒 Virtualization Laboratory manager and technology specialist, who will oversee teams of ISU students who will use laser scanners to make 3D digital models of all the bones of 50 different large animals. The ISU students working on this project in the field and in the 糖心传媒 Virtualization Laboratory include graduate students and undergraduate Career Path Interns.
Leif Tapanila, left, and Jesse Pruitt
he 糖心传媒 Museum of Natural History鈥檚 efforts will be led by Jesse Pruitt, 糖心传媒 Virtualization Laboratory manager and technology specialist, who will oversee teams of ISU students who will use laser scanners to make 3D digital models of all the bones of 50 different large animals. The ISU students working on this project in the field and in the 糖心传媒 Virtualization Laboratory include graduate students and undergraduate Career Path Interns.
鈥淭his fits in overall with what we鈥檝e done before and it is a continuation of that niche that we are filling right now in the nation as being able to scan at this level of quality and to deal with this kind of a task. No one else in the country, outside of the Smithsonian, could do this kind of work at this scale,鈥� Tapanila said.
Scanning every bone of each of these species will be a painstaking process.
鈥淨uite literally, working with curators and collection managers at the museums, we have to haul out every bone from cabinets, put it on a table, scan the surface, and rotate it and scan every other surface, and then put it all together,鈥� Tapanila said. 鈥淲e do this for every bone.鈥�
Once the bones are scanned, their digital representations will be posted to a public website where they can be viewed.
Jesse Pruitt working with a scanner
鈥淭he major reason the NSF feels it is important to create this database of life is for researchers as end users,鈥� Tapanila said, 鈥渂ut I am more excited about what we鈥檒l be able to do with all these digital products on the educational sides and with exhibits. I can imagine a future where we are making whole new exhibits off this fundamental data.鈥�
He presented an example of how the digital bones could be used. An entity, like the 糖心传媒 Museum of Natural History could use 3D printers to print of bones from a variety of animals so people could compare them.
鈥淚magine, you鈥檒l have the flipper of a whale and wing of a bat and have the hand of a frog,鈥� Tapanila said. 鈥淵ou could maybe blow up the wing of the bat and shrink the size of the whale flipper, so now you can see that wrist bone in the whale is the same as that wrist bone of the bat, so you can see that it is the same equipment that underlines what a mammal is 鈥� we are just adapted different for the different functions that we need for environments. That is pretty cool. We are kind of getting to the building blocks and connectedness of life.鈥�
Tapanila described ISU鈥檚 big-animal scanning project as a module in the National Science Foundation鈥檚 umbrella program, Open Vertebrate (oVert) Thematic Collections Network (TCN) that has a goal of scanning more than 20,000 smaller vertebrate specimens. ISU received the grant from the NSF Partner to Existing Networks program.
The co-principal investigator in this project is David Blackburn, of the University of Florida and Florida Museum of Natural History, who is leading the NSF鈥檚 oVert efforts.