CU Boulder Museum of Natural History releases interactive 3D scan of triceratops skull fossil
March 9, 2020 | In the PressFrom Daily Camera (https://www.dailycamera.com/2020/03/09/cu-boulder-museum-of-natural-history-releases-interactive-3d-scan-of-triceratops-skull-fossil/)
The University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History recently released on the internet an interactive 3D scan of its triceratops skull, a fossil nearly the size of a small car.
The museum has been working for several years to digitize its collection, said Jaelyn Eberle, the museum’s curator of fossil vertebrates.
The skull, discovered in 1891 near the town of Lance Creek, Wyoming, was initially on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian loaned the fossil to CU in the late 1970s, where it has since become one of the university museum’s main attractions.
Eberle said the skull is the biggest draw of the Paleontology Hall.
“It serves important research and educational purposes, but it also lets people see a piece of the area’s history,” she said.
The triceratops’ scan was taken by a team of students participating in a course offered for the first time by CU Boulder’s Museum and Field Studies graduate program that focuses on new and emerging technologies in the museum world. Eberle said the museum also is working to integrate new technology into the field.
The team of students was able to create a high-resolution scan of the skull in just minutes using the hand-held scanner.
William Taylor, curator of archaeology at the museum, said the 3D scanner was one of the first purchases he made after being hired last fall. After his nearly ten years of experience using 3D technology to understand animal bones, he thinks the new scanner will be an “incredible resource for the museum to digitalize and share its collection.”
Taylor says the implementation of the 3D scanner will serve to teach students to use similar tools wherever they end up in the field. The scanner will also make collections available to the public, whether that be other researchers and museums, or recreational museumgoers, by offering digital scans for viewing on the internet.
“Now they can experience these objects in a different way. They can spin them around, examine every detail,” he explained.
The new scanner will allow the museum’s team to make some of its more fragile items accessible, like collections of unfossilized bone from animals younger than the triceratops.
Eberle said that having the triceratops’ skull digitized is “especially spectacular” given the historical relevance of the specimen, which existed roughly between 68 million and 66 million years ago.
“The big thing with this type of technology is that people on the other side of the world can look at these specimens without having to travel to the museum,” she said.
Taylor said adding to the digital collection of fossils available to the public will be a big piece of the museum’s day to day going forward. “It’s a great opportunity to demonstrate the future of our museum,” he added.
