Hold a T-Rex Bone in Your Bare Hands, Invites Smithsonian

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The flashing lights illuminate the T-Rex skull like a lightning storm. Its curved teeth, tiny stalactites hanging inside the hollowed-out cave of its mouth, cast a menacing shadow on the grey wall behind it.

We're inside the T-Rex Room at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where a team of 3D-scanning experts are digitizing parts of a Tyrannosaurus skeleton

When they're finished scanning the remnants, bone by bone, they'll upload the graphics online. From there, anyone with a 3D printer and stable Internet connection can download and print her own replica, modeled to scale after the dead theropod on the table in front of us. Read more...