About
An organism’s morphology provides valuable information on its development, ecology, and evolution. Morphological traits provide a bridge between studies of palaeoecological and palaeobiological change and studies of the genetic and developmental factors that intrinsically shape morphological variation, the raw material for natural selection, which must also influence large-scale patterns of evolutionary change. Thus, accurate reconstructions of the patterns and processes underlying evolution require an approach that can fully represent an organism’s phenome, the sum total of their observable traits.
Fortunately, advances in imaging and data analysis now allow for study of phenomic evolution across large clades. However, the barrier to many studies is the acquisition of phenomic data. Phenome10K seeks to advance the field of phenomics by providing free 3-D image data to the academic and educational (non-commercial) community. All types of 3-D images are supported, including surface scans, CT-scans, and MRIs, and all images and metadata are linked to their primary and secondary publications, where appropriate. Images can be downloaded as STL files, with accompanying 2-D views and pdfs of metadata and publications, for ease of use and assurance that appropriate data and citations are obtained by all users. Join the phenomics community by using and contributing to Phenome10k.org!
Using the data
Unless otherwise noted, data on Phenome10K.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
No registration is needed to view the scans, but you must create an account in order to download any files. Appropriate referencing should include museum catalog numbers and the home institution of the respective specimen, as well as both this site and the original publication where the data were presented. Users should inform the appropriate home institution when studies are published using specimen image data sourced from this site, and they should further send pdfs of publications to the respective institutions to allow tracking of specimen usage.
Please use the following citation for this site:
A. Goswami. 2015. Phenome10K: a free online repository for 3-D scans of biological and palaeontological specimens. www.phenome10k.org.
You can also register as a contributor, which will allow you to upload your own image files and publications, to make sure that your work is cited whenever your data are reused. By contributing data, you will promote the study of phenomics and international scientific research community, as well as expanding the impact of your own research.
About Phenome10k
Phenome10k.org was created by Prof. Anjali Goswami, Research Leader in Life Sciences at the Natural History Museum and Honorary Professor of Palaeobiology at University College London, jointly appointed in the Department of Genetics, Evolution & Environment and the Department of Earth Sciences. Her research interests are in vertebrate evolution and development, especially using morphometric methods to incorporate data from embryos to fossils to test genetic and developmental hypotheses of modularity and morphological diversity. To learn more about her research, visit her lab website, goswamilab.com.
Phenome10k.org was designed and built using funds from Natural Environment Research Council grants NE/J012432/1 to Prof. Anjali Goswami and NE/H022937/1 to Dr. Christophe Soligo (UCL-Anthropology) and Dr. Anjali Goswami, and is maintained by funds from European Research Council grant 167769 to Prof. Anjali Goswami.
Phenome10k is hosted and maintained by the Natural History Museum. The code is open-source and can be found on Github.
If you have any technical issues with Phenome10k, please email phenome10k@nhm.ac.uk.