Gadgetory

for years and years vertebrate paleontologist have really been confined to working with the shapes with the morphology of bones and with skeletons as you see behind me here and our hypotheses about how these ancient animals lived and moved was based on how we could put those bones together in the physical world and now for the first time in the history of paleontology we're able to move beyond those methods and into this virtual landscape where we can test our biomechanical hypotheses in in rigorous ways that were we're never possible before my first foray and the 3d scanning was actually working with a Drexel student in our College of media art and design and he wanted to do he wanted to do a master's thesis that was steeped in both science and digital art and so we used an early generation of scanner to scan a 65 million year old crocodile and he put it back together put the muscles and the tendons on taught it to walk taught it to swim and to hunt and that was his master's thesis and that master's thesis actually took it into his interview with DreamWorks and he's a DreamWorks animator now we scanned the fossil we clean it up a little and then we translate that into an STL file you can take the STL file put in another laptop connect it to a 3d printer essentially set a few parameters push a button and 10 or 12 hours later kind of like the replicator in Star Trek out pops the object scanners like this have gotten better in recent years more portable and much less expensive in the past if you wanted to create a one-tenth scale copy of a dinosaur bone it was strictly in the work within the realm of art so you had to get an artist to look at the bone to draw it and then to sculpt a one-tenth scale piece and then to mold that and then to make a casts from the mold and so it was a arduous process and it you know it didn't necessarily have the the kind of fidelity that you want in science and so scaling specimens was a huge deal that was you know in most cases cost prohibitive in the past now it's very easy to get a you know one-tenth scale copy of a dinosaur with this 3d scanning and printing technology it's really important and its really a positive development that a high-tech instrumentation like this is getting down to affordable prices because not all areas of science are funded equally well these kinds of scanning systems now like the next engine scanner base price is about three thousand dollars that plugs into any laptop but for a modest price anybody can get into this field and you know it's to the point where you can have one of these in your house if you're interested in scanning you know Civil War artifacts or whatever it is that interests you being a paleontologist I work with scientists in a lot of developing countries and now you know cutting-edge technology is becoming accessible to them as it proliferate there's a move with intellectual property today to to make things open-source right to open access to democratize it science has always been that way science can't be any other way if other scientists don't have access to my original data where they can reanalyze it in their way re-examine my hypotheses and potentially falsify my hypotheses it's not science so you there's no way to keep science data locked up and so this digital technology is really just a way to amplify the best and essential aspect of science which is that it's essentially open source so now instead of Italian colleges having to fly from Spain to New Jersey to look at the sea turtle and to tell me how wrong I am I can send him the file and he can correct me that way and that's you know in science we never really say that we prove anything the best you can do in science is to be able to falsify your hypothesis and you're not going to do that if the data is an open source