3D Generative AI for Lizard Vertebrae
I am currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the BioVision Lab at the Florida Museum of Natural History. My project is focused on using 3D Generative AI to study lizard vertebrae past and present.
Vertebrae are abundant in the fossil record, yet rarely used to identify species. What if you could take a fragmented fossil vertebra, automatically reconstruct missing parts, and predict its species and position along the spine? Using Neural Shape Models, a generative AI framework grounded in statistical shape modeling (github.com/3D-fossils-Haag/nsm), we are doing that. Our model was trained on nearly 3,000 3D squamate vertebrae (derived from micro-CT scans from the oVert project, Blackburn et al. 2024). It achieves 96% accuracy in genus-level prediction and ±2 vertebra precision for spinal position. CT datasets are available for free download on MorphoSource and you can find select 3D models on Sketchfab. Our project publications are currently in prep. In the meantime, check out features from our research below.
Research Features
This post is from a workshop presented through the WiNoDa Knowledge Lab seminar series at the Berlin Museum of Natural History.
This video was from a workshop for Digital Data 2026 hosted by iDigBio.
This video was created as part of the “Methods and tools for Paleo” curriculum for the Scientist in Every Florida School Program (Ages 12-14).
This poster was presented at Visualizing Biological Data (VIZBI) 2026 in Cambridge, England and won “Best Poster.”
Try NSM yourself
Check out our Google Colab Notebook demos for Classification and Shape Completion in our project GitHub (github.com/3D-fossils-Haag/nsm/blob/main/demos/).
Project Publications
Wolcott, Gatti, Fenner, Koh, Yu, Delage, Sawyer, Stanley and Porto 2026. 3D generative AI for landmark free geometric morphometrics of lizard vertebrae. In preparation for Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Wolcott, Gatti, Fenner, Koh, Yu, Delage, Sawyer, Cutura, Khan, Regina, Stanley and Porto 2026. Fossil NSM - Shape completion and classification for vertebrate paleontology. In preparation for Nature Methods.
References
Bourque and Stanley 2025. J. Paleontology. https://doi.org/10.1017/jpa.2024.89
Blackburn et al. 2024, BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad120
Porto, Wolcott et al. 2026, in prep for Methods in Ecology and Evolution. https://github.com/agporto/SlicerMorphoWeave
Gatti et al. 2025, IEEE TMI. https://doi.org/10.1109/tmi.2024.3485613