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“The alignment features in Artec Studio were absolutely paramount to the success of this project,” said Christopher. The scans then needed to be aligned, cropped and converted to 3D mesh files in Artec Studio. In order to save time, they decided to skip scanning parts that could be mirror-imaged to generate the other side, like legs and ribs.
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In the end, they had 629 individual scans across 71 scan projects. We were able to capture all of the elements we needed, from the tip of the nose to the huge spikes at the end of the tail.” “There were also some interesting poses taken atop a step ladder to reach the tops of the big fan-shaped plates on the dinosaur’s back. “This involved crawling inside the rib cage (yes, a full-grown person fits inside the rib cage of Stegosaurus) to capture the dorsal vertebrae forming the dinosaur’s back and the medial surfaces of the rib cage, shoulder blades, and hips,” said Christopher. The Spider was used to 3D scan individual bones and regions of the skeleton as individual projects in Artec Studio. “Our Artec Spider captured exactly what we needed,” said Christopher. The 3D scanner was provided by Artec’s local partner 3D Printing Colorado. To scan the dinosaur, TPI used an Artec Spider structured light 3D scanner along with Artec’s Studio 3D scanning and processing software. “The dimensions and surface details needed to be close enough to what we would get from a silicone mold so that we could hand-finish 3D prints to look exactly like the original specimen.” “We needed to three-dimensionally digitize the skeleton that could not be dismantled so that a replica could be 3D printed,” said Matt Christopher of TPI. The dinosaur was mounted as a permanent installation in the 1990s, with steel shaped around it, welded in place, and permanently puttied to the bones, making it impossible to ever take apart.
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The Stegosaurus is more than 26 feet long and over nine feet tall, which would still make for a doable cast if the specimen could be taken apart, but that wasn’t possible. Traditional casting wouldn’t work in this case. TPI mounts and restores fossil skeletons and provides casts of them to museums around the world, and its headquarters are home to a collection of casts and original specimens which are on exhibit at the company’s hands-on natural history museum, the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center. Triebold was looking to add a Stegosaurus to TPI’s collection – particularly the Stegosaurus at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which is known as the Kessler Stegosaurus after Frederick Carl Kessler, the teacher of the class of students that discovered it. The skeleton was nearly complete, a rarity for dinosaur skeletons, and this greatly interested Mike Triebold of Triebold Paleontology, Inc. The 26-foot-long Stegosaurus skeleton faces off against an Allosaurus in its museum exhibit, and has been aboveground since 1936, when it was discovered by a class of high school students, who worked with paleontologists to excavate it.
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Colorado is one of them, which makes it pretty special, and the Stegosaurus that represents the state isn’t just the species in general but an actual Stegosaurus specimen that was found in Cañon City, Colorado and now resides at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. All 50 US states have a state bird and a state flower, but only eight states have an official state dinosaur.