A whale of a story

THIS autumn, if all goes well, a new exhibit will go on show at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. It will be a life-sized (or, rather, death-sized) model of a 5m-year-old fossil whale found in Chile in 2011, of which a one-eighth-scale rendering is shown above. Fittingly, the full-sized model will be the largest object ever made by the new production technology of three-dimensional (3D) printing.

The whale was one of more than a dozen exposed by the widening of the Pan American Highway. Local experts planned to remove the bones before the site was paved over, but that would have destroyed useful information about the context of the find. (Was it, for example, a mass stranding?) By chance, a team from the Smithsonian, led by Nick Pyenson, was working nearby.

As Dr Pyenson explained to the AAAS, he recruited the institution’s newly created 3D-digitisation team to fly down and scan the skeletons with lasers, before they were removed. That allowed the team to build detailed virtual models. The result, plugged into a 3D printer, will be an accurate facsimile for the delectation of people far from the Chilean museum where the specimens themselves are being housed.