The College of the Holy Cross is awarded a grant to construct an open access online database containing three-dimensional (3D) digital scans of the individual skeletal elements of extant and recently extinct bird families and fossil taxa. Scanning of bones, database generation, web-interface management, creation of teaching resources, and morphological, functional and systematic research projects will be carried out by undergraduate students, supervised by the PI?s, their graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The online database will also serve as a digital archive for the collections of contributing museums and allows for rapid global dissemination of 3D digital data on common as well as rare and potentially fragile specimens, in a format ready for a wide range of two and three-dimensional computational analyses.
Undergraduate student participation consists of two-month summer internships, followed by full year research projects. The database will be formed as a product of biological inquiry, providing an essential scientific dimension to undergraduate student opportunities for obtaining experience with complex instrumentation and software. Graduate students are provided with opportunities in the training and supervision of undergraduates, which will help prepare them for future leadership positions in academia and industry.
