North American Porcupine Skull

thingiverse

I built this model from a photogrammetric scan of a damaged North American porcupine (/Erethizon dorsatum/) skull I purchased a while back while visiting Skulls Unlimited’s Museum of Osteology in Oklahoma City. The skull is missing the right zygomatic arch and the left dentary. Being a paleontologist I am often not that concerned about the condition of skulls I add to my comparative collection. I'm happy as long as the important features are well preserved on at least one side. If only more fossil skulls were this complete. The left jaw presented here is a mirrored version of the original right. If someone was feeling really industrious they could mirror the left side of the skull to correct for the missing right zygomatic. Bilateral symmetry can be pretty awesome at times. The left zygomatic might be a little misaligned due to an incident, that may or may not have occurred I will neither confirm or deny, in which the skull may have come loose from the scanner turntable and may have hit the floor producing a heart-wrenching cracking sound that might have been heard across the lab. The single STL with the cranium and jaws is really only intended for visualization. There is no connection between the two so printing it would be difficult. The other three files should be fairly easy to print with support. Personally I would cut them up and reorient the pieces to minimize support. As always I leave it up to you to optimize them for printing.