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A pretty quick post this time, but an exciting one at that...
At long last, the first set of 3D-printable model files is available for download! You can access the files from MorphoSource, where you'll find the files associated with details of the specimens they were scanned from. The files are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. For more information on what this means, please follow the link and/or see the downloads/resources page. And if you need a hand working out which specimens to download, you can view all the available files on Sketchfab.
The available models encompass a pretty wide taxonomic and morphological range, and although the taxa are all found in northwestern Europe, they should be useful for teaching the essentials of pollen identification wherever your focus is.
I'm very grateful to Dr Jane Bunting at the University of Hull for allowing me to pillage her herbarium collection for this, as well as to the intrepid botanists who collected these specimens all around Europe six or more years ago. I'm pretty sure none of them would have predicted the plants they picked and pressed would eventually have their pollen 3D-printed, but I simply couldn't have done it without them. I guess that's the value of herbaria (and natural history collections more generally) for you! So Jane, Michelle Farrell, Fran Rowney, Emma Wright, Laura Tunnicliffe, Kim Rosewell and Jodie Hall, thank you.
I've realised I still haven't written up the story of how I spent my summer struggling against the laser scanning confocal microscope - I really will do that soon. I'll also pop back up on the blog with some thoughts about printing before long, as well as sharing some plans for Phase 2... just as soon as I've worked out what order to put the rest of my ideas in!
I hope you find the models useful - as ever, let me know your thoughts about them, and I look forward to hearing about how you use them.
Oli