Check out free animal anatomy reference app Vertebrates

Creature designers and animators needing real-world references for animal anatomy should bookmark Vertebrates (Vertébrés), Laetoli Production’s “interactive atlas of osteology”

The free web app, created illustrator and 3D animator Samba Soussoko lets you manipulate scans of animal skeletons from museum collections in 3D, and even see them in motion.

Compare 3D scans of over 30 animal skeletons from museum collections worldwide
First released four years ago, and updated steadily ever since – it’s currently on version 3.0 – Vertebrates provides a nicely presented interactive 3D atlas of animal anatomy.

The app, developed in partnership with France’s national museum of natural history, and available in French and English, now features 3D scans of over 30 complete skeletons.

Most of them are mammals – particularly primates, including humans – but there are individual fish, birds, amphibians, and even an iguanadon skeleton.

Built-in tools make it possible to measure the distance between any two points on a skeleton, or the angle between any two bones.

It’s also possible to compare any two skeletons side-by-side: selecting a bone in one automatically highlights the corresponding bone in the other skeleton.

Several of the skeletons – again, currently just the primates – can be seen in motion, with the option to play a gait cycle to visualize how the creature moves.

Use free anatomy reference app Vertebrates to compare 3D scans of animal skeletons

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