U Michigan’s Natural History Museum is using 3D scanners and fabbers to produce realistic bones to fill in the gaps in their articulated fossil skeletons for a new show:
In the past, scientists and exhibit preparators used a variety of techniques–borrowing bones from another specimen of the same species, size and stage of development, for instance, or manually sculpting a replacement bone, based on measurements and comparisons with the rest of the skeleton.
Now, however, Fisher and his team are using 3-D digitization, modeling and rapid prototyping–technologies that are widely used in manufacturing, especially in the automobile industry–to produce full-scale replicas of the bones they lack.
“In cases where there are paired bones in the body–left and right–but we found only one, we can generate the missing bone by making a digital model of the one we have, reflecting it on the computer and then producing a physical prototype of the reflected model,” Fisher said. “Compared to all of the previous approaches, digitizing and rapid prototyping are no more expensive, require much less labor and are certainly more exact, more faithful to the original.”
(via Beyond the Beyond)