Preparing ancient fossils to become a modern digital exhibit
Sterling Nesbitt, Associate Professor for the Department of Geosciences in the College of Science, is working on preparing fossils of Teleocrater for 3-D printing and digitization. This exhibit is set to be an interactive experience that can be viewed from anywhere in the world.
We're turning just isolated bones of this animal called Twilio crater, which is one of the closest relatives of dinosaurs. The goal is to essentially scan the skeleton and turn it into an interactive exhibit where you can explore more of where the animal was from, how it was mounted as a skeleton, how it lived, and what it can tell us about evolution in Earth's history. This animal is going to be recreated using the latest technology and a team of artists, engineers, and scientists with representatives from Tanzania also. So this is the first step towards a dinosaur and a bird. After dinosaurs and birds split off from crocodile. So this is like the great, great, great, great, great, on and on, grand parent, a parent of dinosaurs and birds. So scientifically it's really important because it shows that step to becoming a dinosaur. We are recording the process from essentially giving these fossils from the field to the lab. So we're cleaning up, making sure they're ready to be surfaced scam they get surfaced scanned. Then we manipulate them to make a skeleton. And then with that we can 3D print it and turn it into physical exhibit. But we'll also have that digital skeleton that people can interact with anywhere in the world. We're really hoping that we can come up with a protocol for digitizing the specimens and adding all the education on material to this fully immersive experience about any extinct animal. So even skeletons hopefully better mounted in other museums, you can partially scan them, but use the same kind of technology to bring them to life and at educational material, hopefully it's modular two so you can keep adding more and more educational material as you find out more and more about these extinct animal.