April 23, 2013 Last Monday, April 15, the National Museum of
Natural History actually did come to life after hours. Not with
mummies or miniature armies, of course, but with a small group
of volunteers, a bunch of fancy-looking equipment and two guys
at the forefront of museum digitization. Adam Metallo and Vince
Rossi, of the 3D Lab in the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program
Office, work with laser scanners to create high resolution,
three-dimensional digital models of objects and places around
the Smithsonian Institution. Last week, they teamed up with
curators at the Natural History Museum for the second of two
nights of scanning the Dinosaur Hall, the museum’s iconic
galleries that house prehistoric fossils from the ancient seas
through the Ice Age. The hall is scheduled to close in 2014 for
a ground-up, multi-year renovation, so Metallo and Rossi, dubbed
the “Laser Cowboys” by their colleagues, were brought in to
capture the hall’s present arrangement before all the fossils
are removed. “The main purpose