CARNEGIE WAS SO PROUD OF THIS SKELETON THAT HE HAD NUMEROUS LIFE-SIZED COPIES MADE FOR WORLD LEADERS

Dinosaur casting is a controversial subject in science. While the general public isn’t usually aware of just how "fake" much of what they’re looking at is, among scientists and museum curators, there have been arguments increasingly against the practice of casting in the name of scientific accuracy. The question, however, has historically boiled down to education. While casting a large dinosaur is expensive, there are an very few actual fossil specimens, and casts have historically raised awareness of lesser known species. Possibly the most famously cast dinosaur specimen is the diplodocus carnegii named after its benefactor Andrew Carnegie. The nearly complete fossil remains of the animal were discovered in the early 20th-century in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, and went on display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1907. Carnegie was so proud of this skeleton that he had numerous life-sized copies made for world leaders, many of which are still on display in museums — including in Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. The Paris replica has not been reset to conform to modern thought about how the dinosaur stood, and serves as a historical specimen, while the original specimen in Pittsburgh was fully remounted in modern pose starting in 2005. Because of Carnegie’s craze for casting, however, the Diplodocus is arguably one of the most recognizable dinosaurs in the world. Dr. Lacovara’s 3D printing project, with its decreased costs of replication, is likely to affect the ongoing debate about "real" vs. "fake" in fossils, but the positives surely outweigh the negatives in this case.

"That’s so wrong," Dr. Lacovara pointed out a giant leg cast against a wall in the dinosaur hall of the museum, "I’ve got to tell them to get rid of that." He took me behind the scenes, in the back hallway of the museum, where volunteers and students are working on huge specimens he found, dug up, and brought back from South America over the last few years. The primary find is a previously undescribed species of a giant dinosaur, which they are now in the process of cleaning, cataloguing, describing, and ultimately, naming. Possible names which are in the running were written in chalk on a blackboard. The video team, Jordan and Billy, walked in through another entrance, camera rolling, and I had to tell them, "Oh, you can’t film this." You see, these bones are embargoed — a common practice in science when findings have not yet been published. The bones don’t belong to Dr. Lacovara, or to the museum which is, as of 2011, affiliated with Drexel University. The bones belong to the government of the country in which they were discovered, on loan to Ken for a limited period of time while he develops his findings. Dr. Lacovara explained to me that most countries now claim ownership of any specimens found within their territory regardless of who finds them, which is not the case in the United States, where fossil hunting is still a largely unregulated, Wild West, you-find-it-you-own it game.

All Dr. Lacovara owns is the right to name the dinosaur, and the knowledge that if his findings are unique, he will always be the first person to have described it. "Science has always been open source," he told me, and his 3D scanning project will only increase the availability of knowledge worldwide. Beyond just printing bones to find out more about how dinosaurs walked, Ken’s believes that high quality scanning will ultimately become the standard in paleontology, a digital curation and archive of digital specimens which will serve as a "platform for global collaboration among paleontologists." Because the real specimens are priceless, heavy, and owned by various governments, museums, and even private individuals, the prospects of scanning at high quality should be fairly attractive to all parties interested in actual scientific discovery and knowledge. For Dr. Lacovara’s lab, at least, he told me that scanning all specimens is now "protocol." Other museums, including the Smithsonian, have also recently announced projects to begin scanning and sharing their collections.