paleontology

3D printing to build robotic dinosaur models

Rather than using plaster and pickaxes, paleontologists are now digitizing ancient fossils.

Drexel University yesterday detailed an initiative to use three-dimensional printing to create models of dinosaur bones for further study. Researchers hope that models will allow them to study how dinosaurs moved and help create smaller robotic models of massive dinosaurs.

Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara has started doing 3D scans of giant dinosaur bones and, with a collaborator, is building scale models of complete skeletons. The process works by extruding very thin layers of resin or another material to slowly build up an object. A six-inch model of a dinosaur … Read more

A modest proposal: Twitter, meet your new mascot

This week we've seen a lot of the "fail whale," the cartoon cetacean that Twitter uses as a placeholder when its servers are swamped and its millions of tweets are inaccessible. Part of it's because, as Twitter has said, they've needed to do some crucial infrastructure repair this summer. That hasn't been made any easier by the global frenzy surrounding the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa: World Cup goals are delivering knockout blows to Twitter, and surprise results of games can be even worse. Right around the Netherlands' unexpected victory over Brazil … Read more

Dinosaur ancestors hardier than thought

Everybody loves phrases like "when dinosaurs ruled the world," but it appears the reptiles had a more halting ascendance to world domination than scientists had earlier believed.

Paleontologists, sifting through fossils in New Mexico, found in the same location skeletons of dinosaurs and dinosaur precursor species that scientists had thought were rapidly replaced by the dinosaurs themselves. The results were reported last week in the journal Science. The paleontologists were from the University of California at Berkeley, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

"Up to now, paleontologists … Read more