Digital Preservation of the Nottingham Ichthyosaur Using Fringe Projection.

Natural heritage is an important part of cultural heritage. More specifically, the protection and preservation of the unique biodiversity of flora and fauna in a specific region is an important part of preserving and celebrating the cultural diversity and identity of a region and of a nation. Nottingham is a home of pre-historic natural heritage and specifically of the ‘Nottingham Ichthyosaur’; a new species Protoichthyosaurus applebyi named in 2017 which was discovered in the area, probably in the early part of the 19th century. The near-complete type specimen of the species is on display at the Life Sciences building of the University of Nottingham. In this work, we describe the process which was used to digitally preserve the specimen which, it is hoped, will be lodged in an appropriate museum. The purpose of the digital preservation would be to aid teaching and research purposes as well as exploit the data for further distributed research by other natural scientists. To digitise the fossil, which was embedded, in cement a commercial fringe projection system was used to register the bone structure and grayscale imaging was used to register the texture of the bones on display.