T-Rex skeleton with gastralia (belly ribs) and other anatomical fixes

thingiverse

Human: I recently got into 3D printing and wanted to tackle a bigger project to hone my skills. The MakerBot T-Rex skeleton caught my attention, but some anatomical details didn't quite add up that bothered me. Specifically, the model lacked gastralia (belly ribs) and the arms were facing down instead of pronated (with palms facing together). There were also a few issues with the pose that seemed off to me. I used the original model and several remixes to try to fix some of these problems. This is still a work in progress. --For the most part, I printed the original MakerBot pieces but also incorporated fixes for the ribs, h-clips, and tail from the "fixed" model by icefox1983. I was planning on modifying the arms for the pronated hand position but found the model by stargatedalek had already done this (I made a few additional modifications in post-processing). For the mount position, I wasn't satisfied with how the legs hung in the original model. To change this a bit, I printed the original femur and tibia/fibula pieces but used the "Leo Burton" feet from lordlilapause's mount. With a few additional post-processing modifications, I got what I was looking for. --I didn't find any existing models of gastralia on Thingiverse or anywhere else, although there are several people who have posted "makes" of various models that include them. There is quite a bit of variability in how the gastralia are positioned and how they interface with the rest of the skeleton on existing full-size mounts and reconstructions in the literature. I was mostly inspired by the recent remount of "Sue" at the Field Museum and the "Victoria" specimen I saw earlier in the year at the Arizona Science Center (shown in the picture above). In both of those mounts, the gastralia fall just below the scapulae and are "floating" in line with the pubis but not quite touching. In both cases, the 3rd or 4th gastralium is nearly touching the 4th or 5th rib on each side. --I'm a novice modeler, so I couldn't have created this from scratch. I searched Sketchfab and found several T-Rex models with varying quality and resolution that included gastralia. I eventually settled on the Smithsonian "fight scene" T-Rex model because it was a high-quality CC model that was downloadable and was also modeled such that the gastralia were connected to each other rather than free floating. I took this model into MeshMixer and removed everything but the gastralia. The model was non-manifold, so I fixed that using the Edit tools and then rescaled it to match the original T-Rex model (so that the bones would roughly span the distance from the pubis to the front of the scapulae when including the piece that extends of the back of the gastralia). --The gastralia are pretty delicate, so I printed this slowly using both a raft and supports