Animator Alex Tirabasso at the Canadian Museum of Nature where his award-winning animation is displayed.
An animator and illustrator from the Canadian Museum of Nature has won a major prize for his work in bringing ancient dinosaurs back to life.
Alex Tirabasso, a visual storyteller specializing in 3-D imaging, received the new National Geographic Digital Modeling and Animation Award in October. Tirabasso, 34, was awarded the prize at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate
Paleontology in Pittsburgh.
“I was pretty excited,” Tirabasso says, recalling the moment he received the email saying he’d won. “I couldn’t believe it at first so I read it again. It was . . . a major honour.”
Tirabasso’s award-winning animation depicts the true-to-life walking pattern of the museum fossil gallery’s star dinosaur, the Vagaceratops irvinensis. This horned dinosaur belonged to the same family as the triceratops and was first identified by the museum’s researchers in the early 1990s.
Tirabasso’s animation used 3-D digital scans of more than 25 bones in the Vagaceratops’ front limb. These scans took him and his museum colleague, Paul Bloskie, about two years to collect. Tirabasso then assembled them into the walking skeleton legs featured in his 30-second animation.
For years the Vagaceratops was called the Chasmosaurus irvinensis, but it has recently been reclassified.
Tirabasso says this process is common in the field of paleobiology, where new research data constantly challenges scientists’ understandings of ancient dinosaurs.
Tirabasso’s work helped point toward an important answer for museum research associate, Dr. Rob Holmes.
His central question was whether ceratopsian dinosaurs like this one walked with a pillar-like stance, like an elephant, or a sprawling stance, such as a lizard.
Holmes says this question has been debated for the better part of a century.
Tirabasso’s animation helped him conclude that the dinosaurs would most likely have stood somewhere in the middle of the elephant and lizard stances in an intermediate posture, he says.
“The beauty of the computer program,” says Holmes, “is . . . you’re not breaking anything, you’re not expending any energy, you’re just getting the computer to try a hundred different variations to see how they work.”
Without 3-D imaging technology, researchers like Holmes would have to lift and manoeuvre the heavy and very breakable dinosaur bones themselves in order to guess at how they may have moved together, Bloskie says.
Tirabasso and Bloskie, the museum’s 3-D “dynamic duo” agree that the use of 3-D animations in the museum’s research benefits not only scientists but the general public too.
Dinosaur lovers can view the animations online and in the museum next to many different exhibitions.
“The animation has a certain lifelike . . . quality to it that all people can identify with and appreciate,” says Tirabasso.
It was this lifelike quality that made Tirabasso’s animation stand out from the dozens of other entries in the new category for 3-D digital animation in their awards roster this year, says the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology.
“Alex’s reconstruction stunned the committee with its combination of attention to accuracy in detail and its sense of aesthetics. It is both informative and beautiful at the same time,” says Chris Sloan, chair of the society’s Lanzendorf paleontology art committee.
So far, Tirabasso’s award is bringing lots of media attention to the museum’s small Arius 3D Imaging Centre.
It was the first of its kind in Canada and is one of only a handful in the world to be partnered directly with a museum, according to Bloskie.
Tirabasso says his award may get more researchers to jump on the 3-D bandwagon, along with entertainment and electronics developers, who have already widely embraced the technology.
“I think it may inspire other researchers to start working with 3-D graphics and incorporate it into their research in some way,” he says.
“It’s sort of illuminating the whole 3-D paradigm.”
To view the video go to www.youtube.com/user/canadanaturemuseum