Materialise is using large-format 3D printers to recreate mammoth skeleton for display in Lier, Belgium.
Materialise is helping to bring a mammoth skeleton back to the city of Lier, Belgium, where it was originally discovered, with a life-size replica 3D printed on its own Mammoth Stereolithography machines.
The mammoth skeleton was the first ever to be displayed in Western Europe and has been on display at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels since 1989. From October, it will be on display in Lier in 3D printed form and mounted on a quasi-invisible internal carbon structure weighing just 300 kg.
The 320 bones making up the skeleton were 3D scanned and digitally reconstructed to allow for the a sophisticated modular mount structure, which takes inspiration from Materialise’s daughter company RapidFit’s work in automotive tooling, to be integrated. Engineers were also able to re-engineer areas of damage and inaccuracies found in the original skeleton to make the new model more scientifically accurate than the original.
Engineers re-engineered bones to incorporate a new mounting system.
“The original skeleton presents some inaccuracies which reflect the knowledge at the time of the original mounting 150 years ago,” Gertjan Brienen, Project Manager at Materialise, explained. “One example is the length of its tail, which we now know is shorter than initially thought. The original mammoth skeleton is also missing a few bones, including its left tusk. We mirrored the right tusk and recreated it in Materialise 3-matic to achieve a more precise replica than the wooden tusk that was used to complete the original skeleton. The broken upper jaw was also restored accurately by mirroring a part of the original bone structure. This means the 3D-printed mammoth will be more scientifically accurate than the original.”
The bones will be printed on nine large-format Mammoth 3D printers at Materialise which each offer a build volume of 220 x 70 x 80cm. Applying 1/10th of a millimetre of resin at a time, the mammoth will take just over a month to print, before being finished and painted to match the original skeleton.
Bone printing on Materialise Mammoth stereolithography system.
For this project they worked closely with the resident paleontologist of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Dr. Mietje Germonpré.
“3D Printing is increasingly proving to be an extremely useful tool in the field of paleontology, allowing us to study fossils without damaging the precious originals, and collaborate virtually on the same fossil with colleagues around the world,” Germonpré commented. “Working on the first entire mammoth skeleton ever to be 3D printed has been a unique experience.”
