Each September, Western Science Center holds an annual fundraiser called Science Under the Stars to raise funds for museum operations. At the end of the evening we often do a final “Special Ask” to raise dedicated funds for a particular project. This year, for the Special Ask we requested funds for a 3D-scanning, photogrammetry, and printing lab. Our donors, led by the Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians, came through in spectacular fashion. 
Our first purchase for the lab, a LulzBot TAZ6 printer (above), arrived last week. After our initial demo print to make sure everything was working, our first specimen print was a mastodon tooth (of course). It was printed from a digitial file provided to us by VCU’s Virtual Curation Lab, courtesy of Bernard Means and Terrie Simmons-Ehrhardt, which was in turn based on CT scans provided by California Imaging and Diagnostics. The particular tooth is the lower right 3rd molar of a West Dam mastodon we refer to as The Outlier, so named because its 3rd molars are the widest ones known from California (although still narrower than the average m3 from the rest of the country).In a few weeks we’ll be purchasing our scanning and photogrammetry equipment, as well as additional printers, so you’ll be hearing a lot more about this in the months ahead. Next week I’m attending the Geological Society of America meeting, where Brett and I will be presenting on both the “Stepping Out of the Past” and the “Valley of the Mastodons” exhibits, and I’ll have updates from there as well.