Scientists CT scanned thousands of natural history specimens, which you can access for free

Natural history museums have entered a new stage of scientific discovery and accessibility with the completion of openVertebrate (oVert), a five-year collaborative project among 18 institutions to create 3D reconstructions of vertebrate specimens and make them freely available online.

Researchers published a summary of the project in the journal BioScience in which they review the specimens that have been scanned to date and offer a glimpse of how the data might be used to ask new questions and spur the development of innovative technology.

"When people first collected these specimens, they had no idea what the future would hold for them," said Edward Stanley, co-principal investigator of the oVert project and associate scientist at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Natural history museums got their start in the 16th century as cabinets of curiosity, in which a few wealthy individuals amassed rare and exotic specimens, which they kept mostly to themselves. Since then, museums have become a resource for the public, with exhibits that showcase biodiversity for anyone interested in learning about it.

However, the majority of museum collections remain behind closed doors, accessible only to scientists who must either travel to see them or ask that a small number of specimens be mailed on loan. The research team behind oVert wants to change that.

"If you require someone to get on a plane and travel to you to collaborate, that's prohibitive in a lot of ways," said David Blackburn, lead principal investigator of the oVert project and curator of herpetology at the Florida Museum. "Now we have scientists, teachers, students and artists around the world using these data remotely."

Between 2017 and 2023, oVert project members took CT scans of more than 13,000 specimens, with representative species across the vertebrate tree of life. This includes more than half the genera of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes and mammals.

CT scanners use high-energy X-rays to peer past an organism's exterior and view the dense bone structure beneath. Thus, skeletons make up the majority of oVert reconstructions. A small number of specimens were also stained with a temporary contrast-enhancing solution that allowed researchers to visualize soft tissues, such as skin, muscle and other organs.

The models give an intimate look at internal portions of a specimen that could previously only be observed through destructive dissection and tissue sampling.

"Museums are constantly engaged in a balancing act," Blackburn said. "You want to protect specimens, but you also want to have people use them. oVert is a way of reducing the wear and tear on samples while also increasing access, and it's the next logical step in the mission of museum collections."

The goal of the project was to initially scan only specimens preserved in ethyl alcohol, which represent the bulk of fish, reptile and amphibian collections. Specimens that are too large for fluid preservation are also unlikely to fit into a CT scanner, but researchers were reluctant to leave these out.

A partnering grant to the Idaho Museum of Natural History was used to create a digital model of a humpback whale. The entire specimen was too big to scan with sufficient resolution, so researchers painstakingly took apart the skeleton, produced 3D models of each individual bone, then reassembled the physical and digital specimen.