Hello.
The Aves 3D Database has been growing rapidly in the first two weeks of the Holy Cross Summer Research Program. We are extremely excited about its progress and are happy to update you on the additions we have made. Over the past two weeks, we have added 33 skeletal elements to the Database, bringing our total to 271 elements. We have also added five new species to the website. The new species include such interesting birds as the Black Skimmer (Rynchops niger) and the African Darter (Anhinga rufa). We are enjoying our time spent in the lab and are learning new things everyday from Dr. Abby Drake concerning geometric morphometrics for biologists. We are reading the first three chapters of a course in Morphometrics written by Chris Klingenberg. Our goal for the summer is to delve deeper into an understanding of morphometrics and the process of characterizing shear and scaling transformations of morphological variation. Each one of us is hoping to develop our own research project in detail and apply what we are learning from Dr. Drake. This summer has been great so far, and we are excited to reach our goal of having 400 elements on the database by the end of the summer.
Best Wishes,
Tiffany Medwid and Maggie Johnson