“Researchers often sit on fossils for years and years before publishing, and then even after publication it can be hard to see the fossils or even see casts of them,” Churchill said.īy contrast, the Homo naledi team is taking advantage of MorphoSource to make their discoveries more accessible. “Paleoanthropology is traditionally a closed good ol’ boy network where fieldwork is done in secret and findings are kept secret,” said Duke evolutionary anthropology professor Steven Churchill, a member of the team that discovered and described Homo naledi. It’s a far cry from past practices in the field of human origins. Visitors to the site can zoom in or out and rotate the fossil scans, download them and even make their own physical copies to hold in their hands using 3-D printing. “We’re essentially taking bones out of museum catacombs and putting them online,” Boyer said. MorphoSource, which Boyer launched at Duke in 2013, is the largest and most open digital fossil repository of its kind. They, and hundreds of other species, are now available in a free online database of digital scans that anyone can download and print in 3-D. That is, assuming their curators will even allow such access.īut the Homo naledi specimens are a different story. Paleontologists like Boyer frequently travel halfway around the world to examine such unique and fragile specimens. Reconstruction by Peter Schmid and Ashley Kruger, University of the Witwatersrand.ĭuke assistant professor Doug Boyer’s office is more than 8,000 miles away from the vault at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the fossil remains of a newly discovered human ancestor, Homo naledi, rest under lock and key.īut with a few clicks of his computer’s mouse, he can have models of any one of hundreds of naledi bone fragments delivered to his desk in a matter of minutes. The creature is one of more than 500 extinct species whose fossil scans are available for anyone to download at.
3-D scan of the fossilized skull of Homo naledi, an ancient human whose remains were discovered in a South African cave.
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