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The arc, in this analogy, is the National Science Foundation鈥檚 efforts to make 3D scans of all the major vertebrates, animals that have skeletons, available online to researchers and educators.

Technicians from the museum鈥檚 Idaho Virtualization Laboratory, which received a $175,000 grant from the NSF, will travel to the University of California, Berkeley, California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in Boston over two years to make 3D scans of whales, hippos, elephants, rhinos and other large animals.

鈥淲e are excited about getting out there and scanning these animals, a lot of which no one else in the world has ever scanned,鈥� said Leif Tapanila, director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History. 鈥淚t is totally fresh, brand-new stuff. Once you鈥檝e created those digital files, the sky is the limit on how they are used for educators, researchers and others.鈥�

The Idaho Museum of Natural History鈥檚 efforts will be led by Jesse Pruitt, Idaho Virtualization Laboratory manager and tech specialist, who will oversee teams of ISU students who will use laser scanners to make 3D digital models of all the bones of 50 different large animals. The ISU students working on this project in the field and in the Idaho Virtualization Laboratory include graduate students and undergraduate Career Path Interns.

鈥淥ur laser scanners are still the standard for making really high-resolution 3D images,鈥� Tapanila said. 鈥淭he only thing that compares to them is a CT scanner or MRI scanner, which are too small for this job.

鈥淭his fits in overall with what we鈥檝e done before,鈥� he continued, 鈥渁nd it is a continuation of that niche that we are filling right now in the nation as being able to scan at this level of quality and to deal with this kind of a task. No one else in the country, outside of the Smithsonian, could do this kind of work at this scale.鈥�

Scanning every bone of each of these species will be a painstaking process.

鈥淨uite literally, working with curators and collection managers at the museums, we have to haul out every bone from cabinets, put it on a table, scan the surface, and rotate it and scan every other surface, and then put it all together,鈥� Tapanila said. 鈥淲e do this for every bone.鈥�

The researchers only scan one side of the animal skeletons, however. Though all these large animals will be challenging to scan, whales may be the most difficult.

鈥淭he whales are the tricky ones because not many museums have them because they take up so much space,鈥� Tapanila said. 鈥淲hale skulls can be a royal pain. Most whale skulls, especially of the large baleen whales, are so massive, the museums are going to have to winch them up and do all kinds of maneuvers so we get the scans we need.鈥�

Tapanila described ISU鈥檚 big-animal scanning project as a module in the National Science Foundation鈥檚 umbrella program, Open Vertebrate (oVert) Thematic Collections Network (TCN) that has a goal of scanning more than 20,000 smaller vertebrate specimens. ISU received the grant from the NSF Partner to Existing Networks program.

The co-principal investigator in this project is David Blackburn, of the University of Florida and Florida Museum of Natural History, who is leading the NSF鈥檚 oVert efforts.

鈥淣SF recognizes the value that once a species is scanned, it now exists as a digital representation of the animal, and a lot of research and education can stem from that,鈥� Tapanila said. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 even imagine how people will be using this 10 or 20 years from now. The idea is to get at least one example of every major kind of animal, and then over time fill in the blanks of the rarer animals to give full coverage of life on our planet.鈥�