Megafauna 3D

 

Our new project: megafauna3d.org

Join us to discover the fossils of the animals that lived in South America 10,000 years ago. Giant sloths, saber-toothed tigers, glyptodonts and many other prehistoric mammals.

Megafauna 3D is an online platform that invites you to discover the giant mammals that inhabited South America thousands of years ago. It is a fossil digitization initiative, a collection of 3D models and a series of didactic and interactive activities based in paleontology. Some of the animals found in this site are a few giant sloths, a saber-toothed tiger and some glyptodonts, who are relatives of the living armadillos. All these animals inhabited Uruguay and the rest of South America during the Pleistocene, even living alongside humans.

Created in Montevideo, Uruguay, this project involves paleontologists, designers and programmers and will grow over time, by adding new 3D models to the collection. The scans and 3D reconstructions were done by paleontologists from Facultad de Ciencias, UdelaR. The tridimensional models have been scanned from specimens found in Uruguay, belonging to the fossil collections of “Arroyo del Vizcaíno” (Canelones), “Museo Paleontológico Armando Calcaterra” (Colonia), “Museo Paleontológico de Dolores” (Soriano) and “Museo de Historia Natural Dr. Carlos A. Torres de la Llosa” (Montevideo).

Megafauna 3D is an initiative by the Paleobiology Lab at Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de la República (Fcien), and has the financial support of the Agencia Nacional de Investigación e Innovación (ANII).