Hackathons have become a popular way of enlisting enthusiastic programmers to produce software in bursts of a few hours to a few days. The museum put out a challenge looking for help “as a way to volunteer,” said Christina Wallace, one of the hackathon organizers. “It’s a pro bono challenge.”

Winners received one-year memberships to the museum and three-dimensional printed busts of Theodore Roosevelt. “More importantly, they’ll get bragging rights for the next 12 months,” Ms. Wallace said.

“Hack the Dinos” was the museum’s second hackathon. A year earlier, the challenge was “Hack the Universe,” to crunch through astronomy data.

The museum’s paleontologists brainstormed for months about digital tools that they wished existed.

Automating skull analysis was one item on the wish list. Others included modernizing the venerable field notebook to the age of smartphones and converting cladograms — the family trees that show the evolutionary relationships among species — to digital formats. (Nowadays, paleontologists produce digital files that are easily shared and compared, but there are many more from earlier years that exist only on paper.)

The paleontologists also hoped to ease the workload of Carl Mehling, the museum staff member who replies when someone sends in a photograph with the question, “Is this a fossil?”