High Resolution 3D Hand Held Scanner

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Fossil are rare, valuable, and often very fragile. Many specimens are unique, or are of great scientific importance because they are designated as holotypes. Holotypes are unique specimens on which a species is based on. These specimens are part of various national and international natural history museums, or university museum collections and no longer can be borrowed for detailed studies. This is because most of these research institutions have introduced new policies for protecting their research collections from damage caused by transport to other institutions. The proposed RTI is going to be invaluable in procuring high resolution digital images in 3D of paleontological specimens used by our research groups. Research specimens are distributed widely in North America, Europe, South Africa, including such prestigious institutions as the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University; Peabody Museum, Yale University; LA County Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Natural History, UC Berkeley; British Museum of Natural History, London. Some specimens are in UNESCO World Heritage Sites and cannot be removed. The digital images that we will be able to acquire using the proposed 3D Scanner are going to provide visual, morphological, and morphometric data for our research programs, in three different chapters of life history on earth. The visual and morphometric data will allow us to evaluate for the first time the morphospace that these taxa occupied in their communities. In addition, we propose to use the 3D high resolution scanner to gather large sets of data on individual taxa that are represented in the fossil record by numerous specimens distributed throughout collections. Such an example is the Palaeozoic reptile Captorhinus aguti, represented by thousands of specimens, including hundreds of skulls and jaws with well preserved dentition. The dentigerous region of these skulls range in length from about 2.5cm-15cm. We propose to gather statistically significant data sets on the detailed surface anatomy of these dentitions in order to study patterns of wear of the teeth. The initial survey by the Reisz lab of about 50 specimens supports the hypothesis that these animals preferred to chew on the right side, as evidenced by the greater degree of tooth wear on the right side of the jaw than on the left side. We proposed to expand this study to hundreds of specimens so that a clear pattern of feeding behaviour will emerge, the first such evidence in a Palaeozoic terrestrial vertebrate.