Department develops skull diagram site

The Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine's Department of Anatomy and Pathology is developing a Web site that will allow researchers and students to view skull structures on the Internet.

Casey Holliday, assistant professor in the department, is in charge of the project. Holliday said it will allow people to view fossils and other reptile structures. He said this will be a way for anatomists and paleontologists to reach out to elementary school students to view dinosaur structures by putting three-dimensional versions of the dinosaurs on the Internet.

"Not everyone can make it to a museum," Holliday said. "When gas prices rise and people stop going to museums, the Internet may be our last portal to hold or see these things."

Holliday said that he hopes the program will advance the study of human anatomy and behavior as well as the study of reptiles.

"There's a lot of interest in biology in general as to how well the soft and hard tissues in our skeletons adapt to different feeding environments," Holliday said. "If you chew on steak for a couple of weeks the soft tissues in your head will actually adapt to what you are eating over that short period of time. The 3D images and histology data generated from this project will be another focus of this Web page."

Nicholas Gardner, junior biology major from Gainesville, Va., began working on this project along with Holliday in August. Gardner designed the Web site and will present it along with his poster at Capital Research day in Charleston on March 12. Gardner said that this Web site was similar to the digital morphology library that was designed by the University of Texas.

However, the Web site designed by Gardner will allow users to control the movement of the 3D image whereas the digital morphology library only lets users watch a movie clip of the structures.

"There aren't a lot of Web sites like this yet," Gardner said. "The Web site designed by the University of Texas has similar things as ours, but we have more info on lizards and stuff that they don't have. If you load these images on your computer it takes a while using the Digi Morph program while our 3D models allow users to upload the images much faster."

Holliday said eventually the department will put human skulls and skeletal structures on the program so that researchers and students in the medical field can also use it.

Solomon Fizer can be contacted at fizer14@marshall.edu.