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A $2.5-million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant will launch a new initiative to "teleport" specimens from museum shelves to the internet by computer tomography (CT) scanning 20,000 vertebrates and making these data-rich, 3-D images available to researchers, educators, students and the public.
The oVert project, short for openVertebrate, complements other NSF-sponsored museum digitization efforts, such as iDigBio, by adding a crucial component that has been difficult to capture -- the internal anatomy of specimens. CT scans also reveal specimens' stomach contents. The last meals of this hognose snake, Heterodon platyrhinos, were a salamander and toad.Image credit: Edward Stanley and David Blackburn/Florida Museum of Natural History
