Museum Specimens Get Digital Afterlife

⊲ UCL ⊳ The Immortalising Natural History in 3D exhibition at London’s Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition showed how micro-CT and 3D surface scanning create digital twins of museum specimens. Led by researchers from UCL’s Faculty of Life Sciences and the University of Southampton, the project preserves fragile collections while widening access for research and education. Visitors used touchscreen models, augmented reality demonstrations and virtual dissections, and created their own digital creatures for a virtual museum. Organisers said the datasets support reproducible research and reduce the need to transport specimens or researchers.
Letting students study rare fossils online without travelling to a collection quietly reshapes who gets to do palaeontology and evolutionary biology.
⊲ Image – UCL ⊳
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