Fish Division Three Dimensional Scanner

In May 2012, The Division of Fishes at The Field Museum purchased a three dimensional white light scanner through a generous gift from the Negaunee Foundation.  This three dimensional scanner will allow division, Museum, and visiting researchers to quickly generate three dimensional surface models of museum specimens and artifacts.  With just a couple dozen scans over a few minutes, researchers can produce three dimensional point data that can be analyzed and converted to polygons.  These wrapped polygon files can then be measured for three dimensional morphometric studies or be made available to CAD tools or three dimensional printers for model production.

This surface scanner will not only allow researchers to make wonderful and novel discoveries about shape evolution and the functional and evolutionary morphology of fishes, but it will expand our options for making true specimen data available for Museum visitors (in house or virtually).  Stay tuned  as we make some of these three-dimensional materials available.  Below are images and in the small print at the bottome of the window, there are downloadable three dimensional PDF files (please view in recent Adobe Acrobat or other compatible viewers) to explore Museum specimens in novel ways.  The first images were produced for our upcoming Museum podcast - What the Fish? - Stay tuned for more information on this new Museum outreach.  The first fish we are exploring is the Jaggedhead Gurnard (Gargariscus prionocephalus).

 

 

As part of our ongoing work on the evolution of deep-sea fishes, we have scanned a few representatives with a 3D PDF of the lizardfish (Synodus variegatus) below.