3D Images of Over 13,000 Museum Specimens Now Free To Everyone (newatlas.com) 7
The openVertebrate (oVert) project is now complete, offering free online access to incredibly detailed 3D images of over 13,000 vertebrates. New Atlas reports: More than a research project, oVert was a collaboration between like-minded specialists across 25 institutions whose sole objective was to add value to museum collections by making them more widely available. Importantly, these images provide an insight that would only otherwise be obtained by destructive dissection and tissue sampling. Over the course of six years, project members took CT scans of more than half the classes, or genera, of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals, rendering models that provide an intimate look at the creatures, inside and out. [...]
For a working example of the incredible detail and information contained in oVert's images, head to Sketchfab to view a sample of interactive 3D models like the olive sea snake. Or go to MorphoSource to access the full oVert repository. [...] If you have 30 minutes to spare, check out the full video produced by the Florida Museum, which showcases a collection of diverse oVert specimens. A study presenting a summary of the oVert project was published in the journal BioScience.
For a working example of the incredible detail and information contained in oVert's images, head to Sketchfab to view a sample of interactive 3D models like the olive sea snake. Or go to MorphoSource to access the full oVert repository. [...] If you have 30 minutes to spare, check out the full video produced by the Florida Museum, which showcases a collection of diverse oVert specimens. A study presenting a summary of the oVert project was published in the journal BioScience.
Re:free to anyone.. (Score:4, Informative)
The link in the summary with anchor text MorphoSource takes you to the repository. But the combination of "over 13,000 museum specimens" and "free to anyone" does seem to be an overclaim. There are 6399 objects marked as "open download", and 10659 marked as "restricted download".
Re: (Score:2)
I was able to find 19.
Let's see how they really looked (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone please train an AI on this data to predict the external appearance of an animal from the shape of its skeleton.
Would be interesting to see it guess what dinosaurs really looked like.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not sure what you can do with that, but maybe something about the scaling laws of different organs in relation to body volume?
Or, align this dataset with the genotype of each species, that could lead to a better understanding of how genes encode structure (genotype to phenotype).