Typically, whenever I visit a new facility in search of a 3D printing story, I might be invited to handle a couple of prototypes, a fixture, maybe an automotive manifold or two. Today it’s a 60-million-year-old ammonite shell.
“It’s not just about dinosaurs,” Tom Ranson assures me as he places a box of fossils on a table at his lab inside London’s Natural History Museum. For a minute, I swear he can sense the Ellie Sattler fangirl in me but his comment is merely a reminder of the scope of requests, from every imaginable angle of the museum’s 4.6 billion years of history, that arrive daily at his door.
Whether it’s a squid crafted from a lost form of glassmaking, the skull of a living marsupial, or a close up of Charles Darwin’s personal collection – this is a day job where, genuinely, no two days are ever the same. Tom’s four-year-old son has given him the premier title of ‘dinosaur doctor’ but his actual job title of ‘3D Visualisation Specialist’ finds him in a lab underneath the world-renowned museum, where dinosaurs, much like 3D technologies, are merely a gateway to a world of discovery.
Having spent a decade at the University of Suffolk in Ipswich where Tom was responsible for building out the 3D suite, he is now taking that same engineering and logical thinking and applying it to conservation challenges.
“I'm printing things that have been dead for 200 million years,” he says, acknowledging the juxtaposition between technological advancements at his disposal, and the fossils on his table.
Tom sees three big opportunities for 3D here: conservation, exhibition, and engagement.
The lab is kitted out with an arsenal of 3D scanners and 3D printers, which he believes place the museum right at the ‘front of the queue’ in terms of its 3D capabilities. There are portable handheld scanners from Creaform, a Faro ScanArm for larger specimens, and surface scanning equipment from Alicona, which sit alongside a row of desktop printers from UltiMaker, Elegoo, Prusa and Formlabs – all benchmarked, not with your typical ‘3Dbenchy’ but rather a very on-brand Dippy the Dinosaur skull.
3D printers inside The Natural History Museum's 3D Visualisation Lab
Requests come into the lab from just about anywhere – sometimes the other side of the world. The museum recently worked with Western Australia Museum to digitise a set of six marsupial skulls for further research – why fly 18 hours if you can study a digital model? As Tom explains, it’s all about asking conservationists what their problems are and opening them up to using 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies as a solution.
According to Tom: “It's very much a dream scenario because I just get to play with all of this kit."
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Some requests, however, can be a test of nerves, like the project currently under NDA which involved the surface scanning of five objects – the only five of their kind in the world – to record the most detailed surface models possible before destructive DNA testing. Or how about a pair of tiny 3mm herring ear bones, one calcified, one non-calcified, which were scanned using the Alicona Infinite Focus Microscope, and then scaled and printed to better show wear and growth marks for display at a gallery in Finland?
Herring ear bones scaled for 3D printing
When dealing with trickier specimens, 3D printing can come in handy. Tom is able to print ‘jackets’, traditionally made out of soft clay, to handle delicate objects, like the set of gemstones which were put under a microscope for chemical analysis but so small they needed a custom holder to keep them in place. Bigger pieces can benefit too.
“I was scanning a femur of an Iguanodontian, which are around 14 metres tall – so the femur is almost as big as me,” Tom explains. “But because your femur is designed to attach to the hip and knee and to support weight in that direction, when you lie it on its side, it's not designed to do that. So, we've had a couple of them sitting in cupboards which just break and snap in the middle. When we make jackets for them, I feel a bit safer!”
3D printed mountings - the fixtures used to hold specimens during analysis - are another easy win. They provide a better fit for objects and take less time to make. Traditionally cut to size from conservation-approved foam, Tom can instead scan a specimen using the Creaform GoScan, if it’s in the field, or the FARO ScanArm in the lab, and reverse engineer a custom mount using something like FARO’s RevEng toolkit and send for printing. What can typically take a month to produce manually now takes less than a day, depending on print time.
Mountings can also be used to display artefacts in the public galleries, either as fully 3D printed custom mounts or 3D printed contact patches. Selecting and testing the right material however is crucial for stable, long-term applications. So far only two materials out of 13 possible resins for the Formlabs Form 3 have passed Oddy testing for permanent use, while a further six have passed for up to six months, which could potentially be useful for short term exhibitions or during transportation. Then there are pieces like the 3D printed baryonyx claws, of which there are several in various materials across the lab (and another in my pocket to take home) that were 3D scanned and 3D printed to enable visitors to handle during public engagement demonstrations. 3D printed replicas are a way for visitors to get up close to specimens that would otherwise be too fragile or too small to be handled. And much better for Tom's nerves too - if you drop a 3D printed replica, you just print another one, no problem.
3D printed replicas and custom mounts
There’s also a good chance if you’ve perused the halls of the Natural History Museum, you may well have already happened across some 3D printed parts in action.
“There are things out on display here that are 3D printed or that were cast from a 3D printed mould directly above us in the museum,” Tom explains.
Sophie the Stegosaur, for example, lives upstairs and is the most complete stegosaur skeleton in the world – with the help of a few 3D printed elements. The museum is also currently working on a project with University of Cambridge to create the world’s first full fossil of an Ichthyornis. The data is being gathered as part of a global effort which has resulted in a full 3D image of what researchers have determined this extinct ornithuran once looked like. Tom will help reconstruct it, using 3D printing, to deliver what will be the first physical example of the Ichthyornis that has existed since they were alive.
“I don't see any reason not to have a 3D printed element on display,” Tom argues. “It’s cool that there are fossils on display and there always will be, but completing the skeleton so that people can see what it looks like, with a 3D print, it's exactly the same thing.”
The centrepiece of the museum’s main Hintze Hall is a 23-metre-long blue whale skeleton. In fact, a massive project in 2015 to 3D scan Hope the blue whale during an ambitious move from the museum’s Mammal Hall, is one of the reasons this lab was created. But perhaps even bigger than a 3D whale scan are Tom’s ambitions: to build a digital library of everything in the museum. Today, that’s around 80 million specimens.
“I don't see any reason why we don't just digitise everything because it makes life so much easier,” he explains. “Researchers can say, ‘I want to see X specimens,’ and rather than it being a few weeks for them to find it in collections and bring it down to me, it could just be a library they download from and do their measurements. We can validate the model and the measurements so that everybody has confidence that what they've downloaded from us is absolutely accurate.”
Tom Ranson 3D scans a large specmen inside the Natural History Museum's 3D Visualisation Lab
If you caught Tom's talk at TCT 3Sixty this year, you'll know he is passionate about outreach, ensuring younger generations have a chance to not only learn about the artefacts inside the museum, but also the technologies bringing them to life in new ways. In a recent project, Tom 3D scanned a lizard from the museum’s spirit collection (specimens preserved in jars of spirits) and 3D printed a set for an experiment involving different strength magnets and a leaf blower to illustrate natural selection to a class of schoolchildren. For Tom, it’s all about finding weird and wonderful solutions.
“I don't want there to be any barriers to anything because everyone's curious and everyone should be entitled to the same level of access,” Tom adds. “The more people we can get involved, the more weird-like solutions we can come up with.
“If one kid then goes into science, then brilliant. My job's done.”
He is also keen to promote communication between different departments and further afield, collaborating with neighbouring institutions such as Imperial College London and the V&A museum to share knowledge and resources. Ultimately the lab could provide a valuable service for the industry.
“I just want to further science,” Tom concludes. “I want people to enjoy it and be able to do weird stuff. I don't want just one person saying, ‘I don’t know how to do that,’ to put a stop to some research.”
