boneblog

Irwin Family visit AAOD

Mon, 30 May 2011 01:00:12 +0100

Australian Age of Dinosaurs had great pleasure in showing the Irwin Family around our Preparation Laboratory earlier this month.
Robert decided to take his mum on a well deserved holiday around Winton for Mothers Day. While this is a great gift for Terri, Robert also loves Dinosaurs. Australovenator, (aka 'Banjo') Australia's largest predatory animal, is his favorite dinosaur (along with Micropachycephalosaurus apparently), so needless to say he was in his element.

David Elliott took the Irwins behind the scenes, in the collection and introduced them to 'Wade' the dinosaur. Wade is an unidentified dinosaur and Robert is pictured above with Dave and Wades little toe.
Looking at Roberts smile, I think he is having a great time.

An up and coming Palaeontologist pictured here working on real dinosaur bone.
Robert was very content to sit and work on this dinosaur bone and when time was up, he didn't want to stop!

The family had a great time with the AAOD team and the dinosaurs. It was great to sit down with them over a cuppa and some cake to talk about their adventures with animals. Robert even taught me a few cool things about dinosaurs. It's always great to have an expert visit the Laboratory.
They were so blown away with what we are doing, they became Million Year Members!

Robert and Bindi are pictured sitting on the AAOD Foundation Stone. A great end to a fantastic day.
What a Mothers Day present!
The AAOD team wont forget this special visit, what a great family!

Until next time.

REAL Dinosaur Egg Hunt

Sun, 01 May 2011 08:58:57 +0100

Easter Saturday was an extra special day! The AAOD Team hosted the REAL Dinosaur Egg Hunt and Sausage Sizzle at our museum on The Jump-Up. Over sixty children took part in the hunt. They all found an egg and had a wonderful time. And so did we!

Not only were the eggs the size of emu eggs, but they hatched dinosaurs! There was a special twist too...

Hidden in an extra-hard place to find was the Golden Egg. Whoever found the special golden egg won an extra special prize.

After the big hunt we were entertained by the the Winton Mascots and everyone enjoyed a delicious sausage sizzle. It was a great day for the families who came up for the celebrations and a big success for Australian Age of Dinosaurs. Now all we have to do is get our dinosaur to lay more eggs in time for next years hunt!

(special thanks go to Keldan International, who kindly donated their hatching dinosaur eggs for the occasion)

Until next time,

First CT Scans!

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:40:26 +0100

Me, Matt White, Ian Pengelly and Sarah Woolridge
at the Queensland X-ray's CT scanner
with Banjo's humerus (upper arm bone)

We want to bring Australian dinosaurs back to life as properly as the science, technology, and contemporary thinking allows. The aim is to show what our long-lost animals really looked like in the flesh, then make them walk, run and interact as they once did on the big screen! Crucial to the restoration process is the capture of every last bit of evidence the fossils can provide. They are, after all, the most important and the richest source of physical evidence we have.

In a previous post (see First 3D Digital Prints) I described how we kick-started the Digital Dinosaur reconstruction project when our palaeoartist Travis Tischler used Zbrush software to sculpt and restore all the bones of the right arm of our pin-up boy Banjo (Australovenator wintonensis) — the largest predatory animal ever discovered in Australia. The reconstruction and 3D prints of Banjo's arm that we made are impressive, but the bones were all interpretations sculpted by hand. The next step in our master plan was to more objectively and accurately capture the surface contours of each of Banjo's fossil bones directly to computer. But to do that required access to three dimensional (3D) digital scanners; expensive equipment we just didn't have. What to do?

Our palaeontologist Matt White came to the rescue. As part of his PhD project to study the biomechanics of Banjo's arms and claws, he approached Queensland X-ray at the Mater Hospital in Mackay, near where he lives. They had one of the best CT scanners in the country — the ultimate in 3D digital scanning equipment!

So what is a CT scanner? "CT" stands for Computed Tomography. You may have heard of the older term ‘CAT’ scan (Computer Assisted Tomography). It's a medical imaging procedure that uses x-rays and digital sampling to create detailed 2D and 3D images for computer analysis. Unlike other types of medical imaging, CT scans can record every type of body structure at once including bone, blood vessels and soft tissue. The equipment consists of a large square machine with a circular hole. Inside the machine is a rotating gantry that carries the x-ray source and sensitive x-ray detectors. An automated table moves the reclining subject (in our case a dinosaur bone, not a person) through the circular hole. Multiple x-rays are taken as thin cross-sections along the bone like slices of a loaf of bread. Detectors collect the x-ray information from each 2D cross-section and send them to a computer where they are combined into a single 3D image. The result is detailed 2D cross-section images and 3D scans of the internal and external structure of each bone. This is cutting edge science right now but I've no doubt it will one day be routine if not essential for palaeontological research.

Ian Pengelly (radiographer in charge) and Sarah Woolridge (radiographer) at Queensland X-ray were fantastic collaborators and generously donated several weekends of their time to the scanning project. The biggest hurdle was the time required to transport fossils to the CT scanner in Mackay by car. With fragile and priceless fossil bones meticulously packed on the back seat, each trip took me about about 30 hours driving time alone! With every trip to the CT scanner I aimed for minimum turnaround time as the fossils needed to be scanned and back on display in Winton as quickly as possible. A pity Winton hospital doesn't have a CT scanner but as they cost about a million dollars each I may be waiting a while yet!

The other intriguing thing about CT scans is they can potentially see right through jackets of plaster, aluminium foil and soil matrix to the fossil bones hidden inside. With batch processing of several jackets at once we could possibly pre-screen our entire backlog of smaller jackets and see what we have before even opening them! We haven't tested this idea properly yet but initial tests look promising.

So how did we go? Well, we scanned almost all of Banjo's bones (except for a smattering of small fragmentary material) and the results are amazing. We now have a "digital specimen" collection stored on CD right alongside our fossil specimens in our museum collection that not only act as a back-up virtual replica of each original fossil but are the only record we have of the delicate and sometimes surprising internal structures of each fossil — bone marrow hollows and bone density variations—spectacular!

As to limitations or drawbacks, well apart from the scarcity and cost of the the equipment, CT data doesn't record color information, so images are monotone greyscale only. Super fine details at the micro level are not captured either (resolution is limited to the sub-milimeter range; that's really good but could be better). However, a big advantage is that every dimension of each fossil is very accurately recorded. This ensures that each scan can be directly compared at the same relative size without error and you can measure each and every feature on the fossil, both internal and external, directly on the computer down to fractions of a millimeter, which sure beats using a tape measure!

2D CT scan cross-section of Banjo's large hand claw.

The spongy marrow and empty hollow in the middle
of the bone is evident, as are all the cracks in the fossil.

3D CT scan of Banjo's dentary (front half of lower jaw).
Three different rotated views show the outside, inside
and top view. Note all the empty tooth sockets.
In cross section internal views (not shown) we could
clearly see un-erupted teeth deep inside every socket!

3D print of the scan of Banjo's dentary bone. Here
we made a mirror-image of the scan to create the
matching bone from the other side of the jaw
(which so far remains undiscovered).

We made the local newspaper
(the Mackay Daily Mercury) with this cartoon!

Australovenator Cake

Sat, 11 Dec 2010 07:03:27 +0100

Australovenator, front and centre at Australia Zoo for Robert Irwin's 7th Birthday!

Giant blow up dinosaurs rides, life-like dinosaur puppets, real dinosaur bones and a living, breathing palaeontologist... what else could a dinosaur mad birthday boy want? An awesome Australovenator cake, that's what!

1st December saw a great celebration of Robert Irwin's 7th Birthday at Australia Zoo. With a roaring T. rex and the cutest ornithopod baby puppets; huge crocodile and dino slides; along with his very own palaeonologist to talk to, Robert was centre stage at an all-dinosaur themed birthday party. How excited we are to find out that Robert's favourite dinosaur is our very own Australovenator! Whilst we continue to promote our amazing uniquely Australian dinosaurs, it is awesome to see Robert leading the charge - Aussie kids have their own dinosaurs to marvel at.

Bigger than Velociraptor with massive hand claws; faster than T. rex, with teeth like a komodo-dragon; and the most complete meat-eating dinosaur ever found in Australia...Australovenator is an obvious choice. Not to forget our plant-eating giants, Diamintinasaurus, Wintonotitan and Muttaburrasaurus. We thank Australia Zoo, and of course Robert for their enthusiasm for Australian dinosaurs and helping promote such a valued part of our heritage. Something we all love and cherish.

Dr. Scott Hocknull (Queensland Museum) was truly envious of Robert's awesome Australovenator birthday cake. "One of these days every Aussie kid will be as excited as Robert is about our very own dinosaurs... and their names will just role off their tongues... like Australovenator!"

This blog was kindly written by Dr. Scott Hocknull! Thanks Scotty!

It's a Kultarr

Thu, 02 Dec 2010 23:57:50 +0100

On a night time expedition David Elliott was on a mission to take photos for the Biodiversity Program called 'Dinosaur to Dunnarts'! He took photo's of anything that posed for the camera. Armed with a torch, camera and keen eyes... David found this little critter!

All he could tell us was it was fast, tiny and stopped for a photo...only when it was in the spotlight!
Common Name: Kultarr (Antechinomys laniger - GOULD 1856)
Other Names: Jerboa Pouched Mouse, Wuhl Wuhl, Pithci-pitchi, Yurndu (Happold 1972, Woolley 1984, Tunbridge 1991)

Here what our experts how to say... It's very exciting!

'Wow that is a Kultarr, Antechinomys laniger. It's an elusive animal that is decling and rare in NSW and may be declining in Queensland. There were some at Idalia and around Charleville in 2008/2009, but they disappeared about May last year from those places. They are probably nomadic and sparse and hard to trap. the tend to appear and disappear seemingly randomly, not necessarily related to rainfall.'
Diana Fisher - Ecologist ARC Australian Research Fellow, University of Queensland.

'Imagine trying to follow and photograph, let alone see - a grey superball tossed at random and given a mystery spin into a mix of open arid and spikey Triodia (spinifex) and shrubs in the middle of the night!
Luckily, being a predator they are more than a touch nosey so they may stay long enough to look at you, which is better than the rodent hopping mice which are off at the first sign of potential trouble.
I think these hoppy things are both more common than realized, but being hard to trap and rarely seen they are unknown, more than anything else. Those long legs could also mean that Antchinomys are nomadic as they seem to appear at disappear from areas without rhyme or reason and other tiny predators that feed on the same sort of things and live similar lives don't need or have the long legs and don't seem to fluctuate quite as randomly - therefore there's got to be another reason. Perhaps travel it is? An animal worthy of more study once you work out how to do it!
Martyn Robinson - Naturalist, Australia Musuem

How exciting! A highlight for 'Dinosaurs to Dunnarts'. We've found so much already so keep checking out our blog - you never know what we'll find next!

Until next time...

Dinosaurs to Dunnarts

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 01:05:44 +0100

We're not just about Dinosaurs here, we also care about our environment and its biodiversity. The Jump-Up is an extraordinary place for flora and fauna, all specially adapted to this harsh and arid environment.

The Council of Australian Museum Directors funded our new Dinosaurs to Dunnarts project to build a comprehensive database of the diverse flora and fauna of The Jump-Up. Due to launch early November, Dinosaurs to Dunnarts will allow visitors to directly contribute by sending us their favorite photos of the plants, animals and views they take while on the Jump-Up. We'll send them onto our team of specialists for identification and comment. Simple, fun and another way to get involved in the science out here! Here's a sneak peak of some photos we have already:

A female Gilberts Dragon searching for a suitable place to lay her eggs. These little reptiles are inquistive and extremely fast, so capturing this lizard was certainly a cool moment. She was very busy digging this hole and soon posed for the camera's.

The gorgeous landscapes are breathetaking and this Western Ghost Gum found the perfect spot to grow, right in a waterhole! Most of the trees up here are stunted due to lack of water and nutrients. The root systems follow cracks in the rock to find what they need to survive this arid area.

This is the beginning of a notorious succulent plant called 'Mistletoe'. It grows a beautiful little red flower, and it's not the kissing kind of Mistletoe, this one will unfortunately kill the tree it was deposited in. A little bird called the 'Mistletoe Bird' is the culprit for spreading these succulents around the place.

Well that's a little idea about the new project. To see some more great photos, please check out our Dinosaurs to Dunnarts webpage

Until next time...

Addicted to Dinosaurs

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 02:15:41 +0100

All the way from New Zealand, Margy found out she had an addiction to dinosaurs! Her first experience was participating in the Dino Dig in 2007, now she's going great guns and completed her Honorary Technician Assessment with us.
Here's what she had to say...

I would never have imagined that I would enter the world of dinosaur digs and fossil preparation. I wouldn't want to arm wrestle a sauropod or try to outwit a theropod in the flesh, but such is the fascination that their bones have for me that I have come back to Winton four times and the pull of the bones is as strong as ever. The excitement of wielding an air chisel to look for 'my' sauropod bones, or carefully separating 'my' theropod's bones from the surrounding silt and ironstone with a wen pen (airscribe used to remove siltstone from around the bone) never fails. To go into the Prep Shed with its linging of containers of prepared bones and shelves of plaster jackets hopefully full of bones yet to be prepared, to hear the drills working at the ones and to join the team of enthusiastic fossil hunters, is always a buzz.

At the beginning of my time in the Prep Shed I am shown the piece of rock which will contain (hopefully) 'my' bones. Peering through the magnifying lamp I try to find a place to begin my search. I turn on my pneumatic drill (called a Wen-pen) and make a few tentative strokes in a likely looking area. What happens after that is a mixture of a treasure hunt and a jigsaw puzzle combined with a need for patience, rather than impatience to find BONE. Sometimes I am quickly rewarded with a glimpse of gypsum crystals, or ironstone or even BONE (a tiny bit). At other times I can be wielding an air chisel for many minutes as I search for any sign of 'my' bone.

Sometimes the lack of reward for my patience can be discouraging, but when this happens a quick look around the shed at what has already been achieved by other people drives me back to 'my' bone with renewed enthusiasm. AS the hours and days pass and more and more of 'my' bone is revealed, my imagination begins to full the gaps and I am almost able to see where the next bit of bone might lie.

I am happy that when I finish my time in the Prep Shed and I don't get 'my' bone finished in time, that one day it will become apart of an amazing new Australian Dinosaur in the museum, all the way out in Winton, Q.

If you want this experience, give us a call!

First 3D Digital Prints!

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:06:04 +0100

Yes, we finally turned the digital model of Australovenator's arm into a solid 3D printed reality!

Here I'm proudly holding our first 3D print of a full size
Australovenator arm model. The model is on display
in our museum and we show it during laboratory tours!

So how did we do this?, Turns out there are a number of ways to "print out" a digital model. You can carve it out of solid block of material using a computer-numeric-controlled (CNC) "chisel" (basically a spinning router bit mounted on a robotic arm). Or you can print it out in many many thin layers, one upon the other, until a three dimensional object is built up using a special 3D printer.

We chose the layer-by-layer method because we could get a very high level of finish in full color straight from the printer! 3D printing is often called Rapid Prototyping. It's expensive because it's slow to print each copy and requires expensive equipment to do the job. But it's still faster than old-fashioned "analog" sculpting methods and you get an exact copy of the model in every way, even scaled up or down in size. So industry often use 3D prints to "prototype" a product, i.e. to produce a test copy. Such copies are for research use and original prints are rarely seen outside of the development lab. That is of course unless only a single copy is ever needed, making the printout a sort of original artwork. Movie studios do this kind of thing to make props, for example.

We looked into several methods for printing our model before making a decision. The CNC carving method is OK for big jobs like large dinosaur bones but can't easily produce a high level of detail or very small objects like scaled-down miniatures. So we looked into thin layer printing. The cheapest method deposits a type of resin plastic in layers to create a hollow structure with a minimum external wall thickness of about 1 mm. You can print bones with a reinforcing 3D mesh inside, a bit like real bone (as shown the picture below). The compromise is that printouts have a "layered" texture (see the closeup photo below). This type of print needs to be resurfaced and colored by hand to match bone texture, i.e. fine grained on the shafts and polished on the joints. That's a lot of extra work!

The other layer-type technology we looked at was a full-color 3D print method from Z Corp. This method deposits a fine powder to give fully-finished and colored models straight from the printer. For this method, fine sheets of powder are built up like thousands of sheets of super-thin paper. A print head deposits glue and color to each layer one-by-one in just those areas that are to remain solid and part of the model. At the end of the process you have a huge block of white powder with a perfect model built-up in the middle of it. All you do is dust of the loose powder and you have a full color 3D model printed at 600 dpi (dots per inch) in 24-bit color. Amazing!

We were very lucky to find someone with the skills and equipment to help make our 3D printing a reality. David Cuthbert, who owns and operates Zmodel was our man. David knows this technology backwards and he put a enormous effort into helping us achieve outstanding results. Because we wanted to create a full restoration to fresh bone (i.e. not a fossil-finish but bones that look like they are new and perfect) David helped by sourcing color maps for the models with the advice of Dr Scott Hocknull at Queensland Museum. Together they found and photographed representative "fresh" bones. These color images were "mapped" onto our model to give it an accurate lifelike look.

The Z Corp color printing method has some compromises however; it's slow to print and can only print relatively small objects. Printing a full-size arm was pushing the limit for size and almost every bone needed to be printed separately. The humerus (upper arm bone) is so large it had to be printed in two parts that were joined after printing. David was able to join all the separate printed bones with stainless steel and carbon fiber rods and mount them onto an acrylic stand. He also had a laser engraver so we could label the acrylic stands properly. We made extra copies of the full size hand and the 1:4 scale hand and arm so, if you're interested, you can own one! There's such a lot of work involved that we won't be making many, so put an order in soon if you want one (see the Art page of our online shop for details).

Here's what a hollow resin plastic print looks like

A close-up of the surface shows "layers",
inside is the printed "mesh" reinforcement
(this was not the method we ended up using)

Close-up of our full size printed model showing
super-fine print layers, much finer than the resin print above

Our 1:4 scale print of the full arm is just 22 cm long)!

Banjo's Digital Arm

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:57:04 +0100

To my my mind, the most exciting thing about Banjo, our specimen of Australovenator wintonensis, is his arm. He's a theropod predator of the T. rex body type but he's wonderfully different, especially in the arm and hand department.

T. rex is a huge animal with an equally huge head. It uses its head as the primary weapon; it just crunches into prey. The arms don't amount to much, in fact they're so small that their practical use is still not understood. Same goes for many other theropod dinosaurs.

Velociraptor uses another primary weapon; it's feet! Yes, the big toe of a Velociraptor has a killing claw so it kicks it's prey into submission. Kind of hard to imagine but no doubt pretty effective.

Australovenator, on the other hand, uses its arms as the weapon of choice. It's an important distinction as it affects much of the animals possible behaviors and its body form. Hunting animals that use their hands tend to be smart; they can better keep their head out of harms way and using their hands gives them fine motor control to manipulate things. It also allows their feet to concentrate on locomotion and dodging and swerving for position! We think that if Stephen Spielberg knew about Australovenator when he first made his Jurassic Park films he would have made Banjo the star. Instead he had to settle on an artificially oversized Velociraptor with a claw on its big toe! Not quite as glamorous. What's more, Australovenator is already the perfect size—there's no need to boost him up. He would look you right in the eye as-is. Now that would be scary!

Fortunately, we've found almost every bone in Australovenator's arm, so reconstructing it is of great scientific interest. It's a fairly big structure, but not too big meaning future 3D digital printing is very achievable. For all these reasons the arm quickly became our first priority for digital reconstruction work.

To build the digital model we took many, many photos and measurements of every bone and sent them as reference material to Travis Tischler, our paleoartist. From these Travis sculpted each bone using Zbrush software. Ideally we would have used a 3D scanner to capture the contours of each fossil and use that as the basis for reconstruction. However we didn't have access to a 3D scanner so it was all up to Trav!

Below are some computer renderings of Travis's finished 3D Australovenator arm model. Nice huh!

Josh Cotten's Work Experience

Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:41:54 +0100

Josh Cotten came out to Australian Age of Dinosaurs to follow his dreams of becoming a Palaeonotologist. He spent six days working with us on real dinosaur bones and helping with collection work. Josh also helped with sieving and sorting, looking for turtle, fish, crocodile and even dinosaur bone fragments in the matrix collected from dig sites.

Here we see Josh working on 'Wade', an as yet undescribed Australian Dinosaur. The bone is a part of a vertebrae from Wade's back. When we publish Wade, Josh can be proud to have have helped bring a brand new dinosaur species back from the mists of deep time!

Here is what Josh had to say about working with us:

"My experience at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Preparation Facility has been great. I've learned a lot and gained experience in working with dinosaurs. I've had such a great time and would like to thank the staff and Honorary Technicans with AAODL for such a wonderful experience. Also a special thanks to Trish 'Tricky ' Sloan!"

If you'd like an experience like Josh's contact us! How cool to tell your school mates how you worked with real dinosaur bones in outback Queensland!