The skeleton of Australia’s supremely weird southern marsupial mole has a distorted skull “that looks like a god rammed it into a mountain side on its day of creation”, says Vera Weisbecker.
It is one of 189 Australian mammals in a new public database of 3D scans of bones and skeletons where users can spin the mole’s skeleton around, zooming in and out, to marvel at its oddness.
“It’s my favourite because that skeleton is a one-stop shop that dispels the myth that our animals are primitive – it’s like the essence of mammal design in so many ways, with these claws like shovels so they can almost swim through the sand,” Weisbecker says.
3D loop
Weisbecker, an associate professor at Flinders University in South Australia, is a self-confessed “militant” out to dispel what she says is a common scientific myth that Australia’s marsupial mammals are less evolved.
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To help in her mission, she has led the creation of Ozboneviz – a virtual collection of 1,600 bones and skeletons for researchers, teachers, students, artists and anyone else who wants to gaze at mandibles, femurs or the skeletons of ringtail possums or brush-tailed phascogales.
“Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions, but we are losing far more than a few fluffy rat-like critters,” she says.
“Our mammals have evolved in isolation for nearly 40m years – there is simply nothing like them anywhere else. They’re all so weird and diverse.”
As a German native, she says many scientists in the northern hemisphere with a western scientific background see even the common kangaroo as exotic. Australia’s marsupials, to them, are “an alternative universe”.
Vera Weisbecker holds real and 3D-printed bones of species represented in Ozboneviz. Photograph: Flinders UniversityFlinders University’s Erin Mein and Jacob van Zoelen scan specimens at the Australian Museum. Photograph: Flinders University
To create Ozboneviz, researchers spent three years travelling around Australian museums and universities digitising specimens using a 3D light scanner.
Some complete specimens were put into CT scanners so the whole skeleton could be digitised – such as the ringtail possum, the rakali (a native water rat), the golden bandicoot and the northern quoll.
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But there are also more individual mandibles, skulls, femurs and ankle bones in the collection than you can shake a tibia-shaped stick at. The technical detail in the collection means the online specimens can be used to help researchers identify bones found in the field.
“Hopefully this will lead the way to an even wider use of digitisation to make Australia’s unique local biodiversity accessible to the global public,” Weisbecker says.
Illustration of a lesser bilby by Thomas Oldfield, 1888. Photograph: Catalogue of the Marsupialia and Monotremata in the collection of the British Museum (Natural History), London
Ten extinct species have also been digitised, including the full skeleton of the lesser bilby and the skull of the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger that some scientists are trying to revive.
The 3D files are housed in a repository called MorphoSource, but some of the more important and intriguing specimens have been uploaded to a site allowing users to spin and zoom the 3D images.
“This means the public can compare the cranium of a fox to a thylacine and dingo, for example, and compare the size and shape of limb bones of common marsupials,” says the Flinders University archaeologist Dr Erin Mein, of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.
The project is described in an article in the scientific journal Bioscience.
