HEMET, Calif. — 3D printers can print anything from jewelry to artificial limbs, but they can also be used to print relics from the past. Dr. Alton Dooley built the largest 3D lab of any natural history museum in Southern California and today, he’s printing the leg bone for a mastodon, an animal that’s been extinct for over 10,000 years.

“This particular piece has been printing for almost two days so far,” said Dooley. “Each of the other four pieces will take at least a day and a half to two days. And when that’s done, they all have to be glued together, finished, painted, everything else before we have a finished bone that we can put out on display.”

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They may take a long time to print, but it sure beats waiting thousands of years. As the executive director at the Western Science Center in Hemet, Dr. Dooley built the 3D printing lab not only to create installations for the exhibit floor, but also to foster relationships with educators and other museums.

“3D printing is the future of paleontology and especially the interface between paleontology and the public,” explained Dooley.

And the reason is for education. Since fossils are fragile and expensive to dig up, it’s better to scan them and make the digital files available to anybody that wants to print them.

“We need to clean off the print bed. This is the surface the model is going to be printed on,” said Dooley.

Originally from Virginia, Dr. Dooley was inspired by books from Carl Sagan and National Geographic magazine. He knew as a kid, he would grow up to be either an astronomer or a paleontologist. When his math skills couldn't hold up, he decided on the later. 

“So now we have this off the printer, the fun part starts,” said Dooley. “We have to get this piece ready to glue together with the other piece.”

Nowadays, paleontologists use more than rock hammers and brushes. They’re using high-end cameras to create 3D scans and software like SketchFab and Morphosource to make them available.

 

 

“It’s part of the shaft of this bone,” said Dooley as he points out a 3D scan of a bone on his computer.

All this technology is making a huge difference with the public. 

“Being able to hold these things and turn it over and see what they’re made of and all of that is exhilarating,” said Dooley. “And you can just imagine what these creatures look like in your mind.”

And it helps if you can touch them.

“I never imagined being able to make a digital model of a specimen that can be sent around to other researchers by email,” said Dooley. “To be able to go online and look at 3D representations of specimens and then be able to print them out and hold them in my hand just from a file somebody had sent me. It makes research so much easier to do that.”

Imagining the past by holding the present.