Visualization Web site reaches milestones, reveals popular fascination with the diversity of life forms

November 13, 2006

AUSTIN, Texas—The Digital Morphology Library (DigiMorph) reached a significant milestone in October. Since going live in 2002, users have downloaded over 1 terabyte of data (equivalent to one thousand gigabytes). Tim Rowe, J. Nalle Gregory Regents Professor in Geological Sciences and project director for DigiMorph, anticipates a second milestone will be reached by the end of the year: the one millionth person will visit the site.

“DigiMorph was conceived and funded in 1998 as a prototype library for serving large 3D visualizations,” said Rowe. “At the time I had no idea that such a great appetite for this imagery existed, or that what has now become known as DigiMorph would ever be so popular. We are racing to keep DigiMorph at the technological forefront, and to feed what is proving to be an insatiable hunger for great visualizations of Earth's biota.”

DigiMorph is a University of Texas at Austin based initiative that archives and distributes 2D and 3D visualizations of the internal and external structure of living and extinct vertebrates, and a growing number of non-vertebrates. These visualizations, representing 464 specimens, are freely available online at http://www.digimorph.org/.

To date, 124 researchers around the world have contributed data to the library. DigiMorph visualizations are now in use in classrooms and research labs worldwide and can be seen in a growing number of museum exhibition halls.

DigiMorph is a National Science Foundation funded initiative.

For information on the Digital Morphology project and Web site, contact Tim Rowe, 512-471-1725.

For more information about the Jackson School, contact J.B. Bird at jbird@jsg.utexas.edu, 512-232-9623.