Mouse Skull
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A high resolution scan of a mouse skull
Ethical neuroscience research requires interactions with animal skulls. Many neuroengineering designs assume certain geometries, without actual dimensioning. We were unable to find a high resolution, reliable, true to size scan of a mouse skull. We therefore found a fancy dancy 3D scanner and got a nice scan of a mouse skull. The picture above shows the skull and several prints (not that I really needed them, but hey, plastic mouse colony!). These were printed at 1:1 scale, so the FDM fails on the very thin zygomatic process (hey, I learned something today).You might need to print in a different orientation if you need that part. Else print in SLA (white print in the picture above).
View stl here, download file directly here.
This mouse was chosen as a juvenile (4.5 weeks) specifically for a use case somewhere between infant and adult. And, that was kind of the threshold for the scanner (thinner skulls would appear invisible). You could use “Postnatal Craniofacial Skeletal Development of Female C57BL/6NCrl Mice” Wei, et al. 2017, Frontiers in Physiology* or similar to scale the model for your exact needs.
I guess I’ll do a rat and human skull soon…
Don’t have an FDM printer? Support the ONE Core and order though us!!!! Or use an inexpensive outside 3D printing shop. Rosenberg Industries is aware of ONE Core projects and requirements, and has a proven track record with ONE Core projects.
- Wei, Xiaoxi & Thomas, Neil & Hatch, Nan & Hu, Min & Liu, Fei. (2017). Postnatal Craniofacial Skeletal Development of Female C57BL/6NCrl Mice. Frontiers in Physiology. 8. 697. 10.3389/fphys.2017.00697.
ONE Core acknowledgement
Please acknowledge the ONE Core facility in your publications. An appropriate wording would be:
“The Optogenetics and Neural Engineering (ONE) Core at the University of Colorado School of Medicine provided engineering support for this research. The ONE Core is part of the NeuroTechnology Center, funded in part by the School of Medicine and by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under award number P30NS048154.”
