An innovative scanner developed by a New York University computer scientist is allowing scientists to digitize previously isolated fossils in remote regions of South America. Claudio Silva’s PaleoScan offers a portable and inexpensive way to preserve and share collections of ancient prints that might otherwise have been lost or smuggled.
Brazil’s Araripe Basin is rich in ancient fossils, some of which are in unusually pristine condition. After visiting the nearby Plácido Cidade Nuvens Museum of Paleontology (MPPCN), where many of them are kept, Silva saw “a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling metal shelves” that were “piled high with stacks of the most beautiful fossils he had ever seen” from the Cretaceous period, as Silva describes it. Smithsonian MagazineThe problem was that the collection of insects, fish, turtles and pterosaurs from the distant past had not been digitized. And given the limited funds, staff and the remote location of the region (to get there you have to fly in a four-seat puddle jumper plane), there was little hope of solving this problem.
Another problem the museum (and other museums of its kind) have faced has been the illegal fossil trade. The Araripe Basin is a prime target for the ruthless exploitation of historical resources by smugglers and wealthier countries. Digitizing the fossils could help to stop this practice – both by providing virtual scans that balance the risk-benefit ratio for smugglers and by creating a global dataset that would allow paleontologists to trace stolen artifacts back to their source.
“Empowering resource-poor museums and institutions to scan their own fossils and make virtual versions of those fossils available to the rest of the world would, in my opinion, really help the scientific community, but also the institutions themselves,” said paleontologist Akinobu Watanabe of the New York Institute of Technology. Smithsonian Magazine.
Silva, an expert in graphics visualization and geometry processing, saw an opportunity. He left the MPPCN and promised to return in two years to help digitize the collection. Given the scope of this task, it would not have been surprising to hear some giggles or sarcastic jokes from staff upon his flight back to the United States.
The solution Silva developed is called PaleoScan, a low-cost, high-throughput scanner that he packed into “big wooden boxes” on his return trip to the MPPCN in summer 2023. Designed to bridge the gaps between hard-to-reach fossil collections and the global paleontological community, the device creates high-quality 3D reconstructions of fossils through inexpensive and relatively portable scanning.
PaleoScan is adaptable to different fossil sizes and uses a downward-facing camera on an automatic gantry. Its calibration board allows batch scans with easy correction of scale and offset camera positioning. The device costs less than commercial 3D fossil scanners, is easier to transport than CT (computed tomography) scanners, and is much easier to use, even for the less technically savvy.
PaleoScan’s camera is mounted on a frame that moves on two axes and takes “thousands of individual raw photographs of a fossil under controlled lighting conditions,” as it says in Smithsonian Magazine. The person operating it just has to navigate a touchscreen (which in videos looks like a repurposed mobile device).
Once scanned, the batch of photos is uploaded to the cloud for processing, where software assembles them into highly detailed 3D models. The processed data can then be stored in a metadatabase and made available via an API to paleontologists around the world for study and sharing. (Think of it like a GitHub for fossil enthusiasts.)
The researchers say the resulting reconstructions are highly accurate. Museum staff can receive training videos with step-by-step instructions on how to operate the scanner.
Over 200 unique fossils have already been digitized at the MPPCN, using over a terabyte of high-quality data. The response from the paleontology community has been open and enthusiastic. Researchers unaffiliated with the project have been impressed with the scanner and hope to soon get their hands on versions for other remote regions in Mexico and Chile. Some have requested an improved model with true 3D capabilities, rather than the current two-axis version that is ideal for the predominantly flat fossils of the Araripe Basin. Silva says that work is already underway on this.
For more information on PaleoScan’s innovation and future, see the research report and Detailed report from Smithsonian Magazine.
