Each
color on this computer-generated image of our Triceratops
skull and jaws indicates a separate pass of a 3-D surface
scanner that captured the data to describe the bones. All
the passes were knit together to produce this image. Incompletely
colored areas were not picked up by the scan.
We used
this technology to capture the shapes of all the bones in
our skeleton in the computer, reverse or resize them to
fix problems with the original skeleton, create prototype
replacements, and analyze every bone. Thus our Triceratops
has become the first digital dinosaur, and enabled closer
study of this three horned-plant eating-dinosaur than ever
before.
