Dinosaurs in 3D

«— What’s the chance of meeting a dinosaur on the street?
— 50%!
— Really! Why?
— You’ll either meet one or you won’t!»
A Joke.

For a while, we’ve known that archeologists have been using our technology successfully to scan excavation sites and fossils. We always wanted to try it for ourselves and recently got that chance.

We made our way down to the Moscow Paleontology Museum. There, we were asked to scan a large scull of a big Tarbosaurus — a creature that roamed the Earth about 70 million years ago.

Tarbosaurus — a close relative of Tyrannosaurus inhabited Asia and was a large bipedal predator, weighing more than a ton and equipped with dozens of large, sharp teeth which can be perfectly seen on the resulting scan. More about this dinosaur can be read on Wikipedia.

To capture not only shape, but color, we equipped ourselves with the new Artec MHT scanner (lovingly called Wall-e by our R&D team). To scan the scull, we used an old Samsung laptop with 4Gb of RAM and a Windows 7 operating system. This gave us a scanning speed of about 7 frames per second, which in turn, enabled us to scan the monster, 1.2 meter long scull in about 2 hours. The scanning process was smooth and easy, ultimately ending up with 1.2Gb of raw data.

The final mesh turned out great and a bit terrifying. The teeth were huge! We were hoping not to meet one of these guys on the way back to the office, but if probability calculus and that joke at the beginning of this post are correct, everyone will meet a dinosaur at some point! ;)