While collecting shellfish for dinner, archaeologist Marie Wood spotted a dinosaur footprint in the Yorkshire cliffside. The footprint is all that remains of a Megalosaurus that trod across Britain 300 million years ago. But the fragile fossil won’t survive long – if erosion doesn’t destroy it, collectors could take it. A local scientist captured images of the footprint hoping to create a 3D model should the fossil disappear – a small example of how 3D printing enhances paleontological research, preserves collections, and makes fossils more accessible to the general public.
Figuring Out How Extinct Animals Worked
Many paleontologists are using 3D printing to understand the structure and lives of long-extinct animals. Archeria, for example, were 2-meter long amphibious predators that lived during the Permian period and died out before the rise of the dinosaurs. Yet, even though Archeria no longer exist, they could inform the development of walking robots.
University of Pennsylvania scientist Aja Carter has pioneered the use of paleontology to inform robotics design. Scanning and resin 3D printing the vertebrae of Archeria fossils, she assembles motorized spines to study the dynamics of these ancient walkers.
“On top of making extinct monsters move, I’m also developing a method,” Dr. Carter said. “The techniques to do what I do don’t exist, so I’m making them. This thing hasn’t moved in a very long time—about 300 million years. We’re making it move, which is so exciting.”
Protecting Collections
Protecting fragile fossils is another common use of 3D printing in paleontology. Scientists do not just worry about tides eroding dino footprints. Merely picking up a fossil could do irreparable damage and destroy a specimen’s scientific potential.
The Texas Through Time Fossil Museum has a Dimetrodon limbatus fossil. Dimetrodons lived millions of years before the dinosaurs and had a neural spine sail rising from their backs. The museum’s sample was too delicate for casting and other classic preservation techniques so they turned to 3D printing.
The museum used an NVision handheld scanner to generate a 33.5 million point cloud of data that became a 3D model.
“There are lots of challenges when working with fossils, the first and foremost being that they are fragile and irreplaceable,” museum director Andre LuJan said in an Industry Week interview. “The handheld scanner was a perfect fit for our static mounted skeleton.”
The 3D printed Dimetrodon parts are now available for scientists studying the creature’s structure and evolutionary context.
Sharing with the Public
But scientists are not the only ones who benefit from dino 3D printing. The technology also helps museums share their collections with the public. In April, a full-scale, 3D-printed T.rex shipped from Europe to Japan thanks to a sister-city relationship between The Netherlands’ Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Nagasaki’s Dinosaur Museum.
Naturalis has a fossilized T.rex named Trix. To help celebrate the Dinosaur Museum’s opening, Dutch scientists scanned Trix’s skeleton into a 3D modeling system. Using their Builder Extreme 1500 large format filament printers, they produced a 12.5 meter long, 300 kilogram, full-scale replica of the dinosaur.
3D printing is not just the wave of the future. From advancing scientific research to enhancing public appreciation of Earth’s history of life, 3D printing makes the past more accessible.
