July 28, 2015 | By Simon
While we’ve seen how additive manufacturing has helped preserve and restore everything from ancient artifacts to the structures that house the artifacts themselves, leading zoologists have recently been exploring the application of 3D printing for rebuilding rare and extinct specimens who may be missing a critical part of their bone assembly.
Particularly, Jack Ashby, the manager at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London has recently turned to 3D printing to help recreate a leg for one of the rarest zoological museum specimens in the world, a quagga.
The quagga is a subspecies of the plains zebra that lived in South Africa until the 19th century when it was hunted to extinction. While it has long thought to be a distinct species, it is in fact the southernmost subspecies of the plains zebra. The species is so rare in fact, that the Grant Museum of Zoology owns one of just seven known quagga skeletons to exist.
While the museum has kept the skeleton in impeccable condition over the years, it has been standing on just three legs since it was first installed. In order to create the fourth leg, Ashby got in contact with the Royal Veterinary College and the Bartlett Manufacturing and Design Exchange at University College London’s School of Architecture to recreate a flipped version of the right hind leg in order to replace the missing left leg.
“Not only does it add a fantastic chapter to a specimen with so many stories, but the new leg also makes the whole skeleton more stable,” said Ashby. “Try balancing on three legs for 100 years.”
Considered to be one of the museum’s greatest treasures, it wasn’t always recognized as a valuable piece of zoological history. In the early 1900s, six similar specimens were mounted simultaneously with little care and many of the bones were misplaced or mismatched if not damaged by the careless handlers - who even went so far to label the distinctive animal as a plain zebra.
In the early 1970s, scientists decided to take a more refined look at the six specimens and learned that of the specimens that were mounted, one was a quagga and one was a donkey and that the quagga was also missing a leg, which was assumed to have been loaned out for study purposes and never returned.
“The files are full of copies of letters from my predecessors saying: ‘Have you by any chance got our quagga leg and if so can we have it back?’” added Ashby.
Since the 1970s, the museum has taken considerable more care of the specimen and have restored and treated it into the existing model that visitors see today; one of the largest and most important specimens in all of the museum’s collection.
In order to recreate a flipped version of the right hind leg in order to replace the missing left leg, the team of workers at the Royal Veterinary College and the Bartlett Manufacturing and Design Exchange at University College London’s School of Architecture used a CT scanner to create a digital 3D model of the right hind leg, which was subsequently mirrored to create a left leg using a 3D modeling program. Once the model was optimized for 3D printing, the team then 3D printed the leg using solid nylon. With an accurate replica of the specimen’s left hind leg ready to go, specialist Nigel Larkin then added it to the existing skeleton assembly. In order to help make the difference between the actual bones and the 3D printed bones more clear, the museum colored the new leg black - a decision that also allows for museum visitors to see just how powerful 3D printing can be when used to replicate existing objects.
Although the 3D printed leg has remarkably gotten the quagga back up on four legs again, Ashby still hopes that the real leg might show up one day.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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