WitmerLab at Ohio University

Witmer was invited to lead a discussion on “Fleshing Out Dinosaur Evolution” as part of the Science Café series sponsored by Sigma Xi and ONCA. WitmerLab members moved 15-20 skull casts and other specimens from the lab to OU’s Front Room. It was free and open to the university community and public. It was well attended... with good discussions about the science of dinosaur research, evolution, and the role that dinosaurs can play in society.Read More

Animation of the skull, brain endocast, and inner ear of the Oligocene (~30 mya) creodont Hyaenodon (SDSMT 3017). This movie was generated to accompany the "Prehistoric Predators: Razor Jaws" premiere on 12 Oct 2009 on the National Geographic Channel. Rendered in Amira, Maya. and QuickTime by Ryan Ridgely. Also availab...le on our YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeVYu777VL0 For more videos like this, please visit http://www.ohio.edu/witmerlabRead More

Animation of the skull, brain endocast, and inner ear of the Oligocene (~30 mya) entelodont Archaeotherium. This movie was generated to accompany the "Prehistoric Predators: Killer Pig" premiere on 12 Oct 2009 on the National Geographic Channel. Rendered in Amira, Maya. and QuickTime by Ryan Ridgely. Also available on ...our YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9xfnQM15_Q . For more videos like this, please visit http://www.ohio.edu/witmerlabRead More

TV shoot for a National Geographic Channel production of "Bizarre Dinosaurs" (air date: 11 Oct 2009). Witmer's interview focused on the skull, brain, and inner ear of Nigersaurus, as well as comments on the unusual adaptations of other dinosaurs. Also, an entire day was spent filming the transport and CT-scanning of a ...frozen rhino head (one way to learn about bizarre dinosaurs is to study the bizarre attributes of animals living today). Sadly, none of the footage was used on the TV show, but is chronicled here.Read More

Animation of the skull, brain endocast, and inner ear of the diplodocoid sauropod dinosaur Nigersaurus. The animation starts with sortuva "normal-looking" head posture, but transparency reveals a rotated brain and inner ear; rotating the inner ear so that it's oriented like modern-day animals do when they're alert show...s that Nigersaurus had an almost vertical alert posture. This movie was generated to accompany the "Bizarre Dinosaurs" premiere on 11 Oct 2009 on the National Geographic Channel. Rendered in Amira and QuickTime by Ryan Ridgely. Also available on our YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUXD9QQ4LmQ. For more on Nigersaurus, including the PLoS ONE publication, visit http://www.oucom.ohiou.edu/dbms-witmer/Nigersaurus_main.htm.Read More

TV shoot for a National Geographic Channel production of "Bizarre Dinosaurs" (air date: 11 Oct 2009). Witmer's interview focused on the skull, brain, and inner ear of Nigersaurus, as well as comments on the unusual adaptations of other dinosaurs. Also, an entire day was spent filming the transport and CT-scanning of a ...frozen rhino head (one way to learn about bizarre dinosaurs is to study the bizarre attributes of animals living today). Sadly, none of the footage was used on the TV show, but is chronicled here.Read More

Acclaimed artist Mark Dion collaborated with the OU School of Art for a special exhibit at the Kennedy Museum of Art called “Collections Collected.” We were honored to be among the collections sampled by Dion for the exhibit. The fascination of the exhibit goes well beyond just seeing our stuff included in the installa...tion, as we marveled at the sometimes arresting alliance of our materials with surprising partners. The exhibit is fractal, offering varied impressions and details from a distance and up close. A sense gained by close inspection of an individual object often changes when seen in the context of adjacent objects. WitmerLab materials are tagged in the images for reference, but it’s not really right to extract items from the whole.Read More

Rolling animation of the skeleton and body of a duckbill platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus; USNM 221110). An entire platypus, a female collected in 1916 and "pickled" in alcohol, was borrowed from the Smithsonian and scanned on a Toshiba Aquillion 64 CT scanner at O'Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, OH. Rendered in... Amira and QuickTime by Ryan Ridgely. Also available on our YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnZxujP7u28. Visit http://www.ohio.edu/WitmerLab for more videos like this.Read More

Chief CT Technologist Heather Rockhold scanning the skull of the tyrannosaur NanoT ("Nanotyrannus") at O'Bleness Memorial Hospital in Athens, Ohio, a few years ago. Ironically, due to HIPAA regulations protecting patient privacy, pictures of Heather "at work" will probably be limited to her work with dinosaurs and the ...like. And over the course of the past decade or so, she's scanned literally hundreds of dinosaur specimens...and rhinos, giraffes, pigs (even a live one!), crocodiles, birds...Read More