Dinosaur printing11/29/2023 At a small scale with a high degree of accuracy, however, the problems of size and weight would no longer apply. These questions have been unanswered and debated largely because of scale: dinosaur fossils are gigantic, and they weigh sometimes several tons, making simple tasks like fitting different pieces together nearly impossible. One of the main problems with dinosaurs, of course, has been the changing perceptions of how they stood, moved, and what they looked like. Lacovara, however, was positing that this technology could be incredibly useful for solving actual problems in paleontology which have plagued scientists since dinosaur fossils were first discovered. But, he reported, that wouldn't be the end of it: they intended, he said, to use those scale polymer "printouts" to model and then engineer fully working limbs, complete with musculature - to create, in effect, a fully accurate robotic dinosaur leg or arm, and eventually, a complete dinosaur.ģD printing is one of those technologies which has gotten a lot of press because it has an incredibly high cool factor, but which also hasn't yet seen much practical application. The Engineering department would then take those scans and use a 3D printer to create 1/10 scale models of the most important bones. Lacovara had announced that the Paleontology department at Drexel would team up with the Engineering department for what would largely be a novel new project: scanning all of the fossils in the University's collection (including some previously unidentified dinosaurs of Lacovara's own finds in other parts of the world) using a 3D scanner. The marl pits of Southern New Jersey are famous for something else, though: they have been incredibly rich in fossil finds. Marl, a lime-rich mud, had been mined and used as the 19th century’s leading fertilizer, but since around World War II (with the development of more advanced, synthetic fertilizers), demand for it has steeply lessened, and there aren’t many marl mining businesses left in the US. In April of this year, I headed out to a marl pit in Clayton, New Jersey to watch a team of Drexel University students and their teacher, Professor Kenneth Lacovara, dig for fossils.
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