Saturday, November 30, 2013

Bat Scan

This week I attempted to use our laser scanner to create a 3D image of one our museum bats.  While running the scan was fun and great practice, the actual 3D image came out horrendous! Some things I thought of afterwards...

1) I was particularly interested in the ears of this bat and I realized the specimen I picked was way too small to get any resolution

2) As cute as this little guy was, his fuzzy fur made scanning and aligning multiple images pretty rough.

Next week I shall get a better scan!



Friday, November 29, 2013

When the bats come out for dinner

Welcome!  I have started a blog in the hope of documenting some of the great things I get to experience at the University of Washington.  I am a new graduate student and I have a passion for morphology in many fields functional to ecological.  I love to draw and take pictures and one of my goals for starting a blog is to remind me to set aside more time to do such activities.

Firstly, I wanted to catch up on some of the important events that have happened in my life this last couple months.

I am part of a new research lab at the University of Washington, I am both new to the lab and starting at a brand new lab!   I have been adjusting to learning about the wonders & diversity of mammals (coming from a rather fishy background) and incorporating a suit of new technology from laser scanners to CT scanners.  Access to this technology is a wonderland for a functional morphologist, like myself.

First things first, let's go all the way back to October. Our lab was featured at a donor dinner  and all of our lab members talked about some specialty area of research in the lab.  One of our undergrads talked about skull shape in carnivores, our lab tech discussed our awesome CT scanner and the graduate students talked about bat diversity both tropical and temperate.

 The table.
 Elena and her carnivores from bats to leopards!
We went a little batty...