Megafauna 3D (http://www.megafauna3d.org/en/) 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. 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.

On the technical side, the project has used both active 3D scanning and photogrammetric technologies to produce 3D models of the specimens. The project has selected and used two open-source software resources developed by CNR-ISTI:
- MeshLab (http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ ) was used for the postproduction of the 3D models;
- 3DHOP (http://www.3dhop.net/ ) was adopted to enable web-based publication and visualization of the 3D models.

Technical details on this project are published at http://www.megafauna3d.org/en/the-project/
Contact: R. Scopigno, Visual Computing Lab, CNR-ISTI, r.scopigno@isti.cnr.it