Photogrammetry for our fossils? Yey!

Cave bear mandible from Urșilor Cave. This image was processed from 297 high-resolution pictures. Foto: Laurențiu Angheluță

We hope that in the future, all scientists will document to their best the fossil specimens they are working on, for preserving the original morphological features prior to subsequent analyses.

For us, it is very important to document the fossil bone before the destructive sampling (although we’ll try to do it at a minimum) that will occur.

Our collaborator, Dr Laurențiu Angheluță, a researcher from INOE (The National Institute for Research and Development for Optoelectronics) started to take high-resolution pictures of the mandibles we are going to study within INTEGRATE in order to create tridimensional images for our samples.

Although it might look like a very simple job, the practice showed us it’s not an easy thing. Only for a cave bear mandible, Laurențiu will take around 300-400 high-resolution photo shoots. After that, the processing of the data will take even longer than the shooting itself. However, the first results are marvellous! The 3D images of these bones are so accurate and we will be able to measure them digitally and even to create landmarks for analyzing the morphology.

We are so excited and proud that we’ll have the entire bone collection of INTEGRATE scanned and properly documented.

...and we haven’t started it yet 😉

Keep close!