In a journal article published Wednesday in Bioscience, researchers revealed that a multi-year project to create a place where free digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models can live has concluded.
By last November, the openVertebrate project (oVert for short) team, directed by biologists at the Florida Museum of Natural History, had created media files for more than 13,000 specimens. To create this library of 3D scans, approximately 380 loans of specimens were exchanged across all 50 states.
“We didn’t light the initial flame of 3D imaging of specimens,” says project leader David Blackburn, who serves as curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum, according to an article from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “But we helped to nurture and grow it such that it has spread and ignited many museums and scientists.”
AAAS said that the project was funded by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
According to the Bioscience article, oVert’s estimated 29,000 total media files generated data for more than half of all genera of fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. It is one of the largest collections of its kind.
Some of the specimens featured by the Florida Museum include: the white-barred boxfish, Van Dam’s girdled lizard, Spinx’s horned treefrog, shovelnose sturgeon, the shortfin mako shark, the Mexican bearded lizard and lined seahorse.
The Florida Museum also explained the challenging process of scanning a humpback whale and a collection of Galapagos tortoises.
“The impact of preserved museum specimens is transforming and increasing by three-dimensional (3D) imaging that creates high-fidelity online digital specimens,” said the journal article. “Through examples from the openVertebrate (oVert) Thematic Collections Network, we describe how we created a digitization community dedicated to the shared vision of making 3D data of specimens available and the impact of these data on a broad audience of scientists, students, teachers, artists, and more.”
With access to high-fidelity digital 3D models, people from multiple communities can now look at specimens at the same time, while they would have been required to make an in-person visit before. Researchers likened the collection to “cabinets of curiosity,” private collections of specimens that were often established in the homes of wealthy people.
“Because relatively few people – who are not representative of humanity as a whole—have had access to these resources, the potential impacts of these collections have been limited,” the researchers explained.
They don’t believe that the digitization of the specimens will eliminate the need for physical objects. In fact, the scientists believe their cabinet of curiosities will spark increased interest in the original specimens.
“Further, some imaging modalities, such as those based on X-ray or magnetic fields, deepen the exploration of physical objects by providing new data on their internal structures,” the team added.
Work on the project began in 2017. Although the project concluded last August, researchers said it also demonstrates the opportunities 3D digital imaging might offer in the future.
“Scientists have already used data from the project to gain astonishing insights into the natural world,” said the Florida Museum in a press release.
You can visit the full collection here.