Nature museum animator cracks secret to how horned dinosaurs moved
It took him more than two years, but an animator from the Museum of Nature has helped crack the mystery of how horned dinosaurs, such as the Triceratops and Torosaurus, walked.
His work, which has been lauded by paleontologists from around the globe, has won an award from National Geographic and the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
"To the common person, it's like 'cool, but so what?'" said Alex Tirabasso, a visual storyteller with the museum's Arius 3D Imaging Centre. "But, for paleontologists these are huge questions. It has huge implications in their research."
For his 30-second video showing a true-to-life scientific animation of the dinosaur Chasmosaurus irvinensis walking, Tirabasso, 34, received the National Geographic Digital Modeling and Animation Award Oct. 13 at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Pittsburgh. The dinosaur was identified as a new species by researchers at the Museum of Nature in the 1990s and has been a centrepiece of its popular fossil gallery ever since.
To make the animation, Tirabasso said he spent more than two years performing 3-D scans of more than 25 bones from the dinosaur's forelimb in order to create digital models that could be used in a computer program to reassemble the dinosaur's skeleton.
After that, Tirabasso was able to make the video showing the dinosaur's most efficient walking posture.
"For the first time, we were able to merge scan data for ceratopsian (Chasmosaurus) limb bones with modern animation techniques," he said.
Tirabasso's research helped museum research associate Rob Holmes resolve an ongoing question about the gait of the dinosaur.
"The researchers hypothesized that it might have either a pillar-like stance similar to an elephant, or a sprawling, squat-like stance like a lizard,'' said the museum in a news release.
"Without the 3-D animation, their ability to answer this question was limited to drawings and physical study of the bones that make up the dinosaur's hand and limb.''
The animation showed the most efficient walking posture to be an intermediate form, somewhere between the two.
The animation also revealed how the bones would move in relation to each other.
Tirabasso, who graduated from Sheridan College's animation program and has been making animations for the the museum for more than eight years, said paleontologists previously manually held skeletons together with rope and wire in order to guesstimate how the creatures moved.
Modeling used in movies such as Walking With Dinosaurs or Jurassic Park is designed more for cinematic flair than scientific accuracy, he said.
The digital modelling is far more accurate than previous methods used.
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