Over the course of the last decades computers have evolved from a useful tool for
rapidly calculating large amounts of equations to an indispensable part of everyday
life. Today, cars will not run if a chip is faulty, and communication not only by
phone and email, but also by conventional mail depends on computer codes.
Computer generated or edited sounds and images dominate advertising, and their
influence on education and especially entertainment is rapidly growing.
Slowly, computers have also found their way into science beyond the classic
number-crunching applications in, e.g., climate modeling and statistical analysis.
They can be useful tools for taxonomy, e.g., for cladistic analyses or for archiving
and analyzing taxonomic data (see Elewa 2010). As pointed out by Elewa (2009),
however, there is a bias in the use of modern computing techniques for vertebrate
paleontology. At the other end of the scientific process, publication has also “gone
digital”, with journals such as PLoS One. The first fully online journal with a focus on
paleontology is Palaeontologia Electronia, which started publishing online in 1998,
open to any new and promising technique and data format for presenting scientific
data and results (MacLeod and Patterson 1998). Authors are actively encouraged to
experiment with new data formats. As pointed out by Elewa (2007), many research
institutions sadly are slow in adapting to this novel way of knowledge distribution,
and need convincing to accept e-publication as equal to conventional paper journals.
Because even detailed 3D objects can now be depicted and animated quickly on
ordinary office and household computers, due to the high demand of many computer
simulation games on 3D graphics power, an ever growing number of scientists
use these powers for vertebrate paleontology. A classic method for obtaining 3D
data on a fossil, prepared or unprepared, is via tomography. This is “the representation
of three-dimensional structure as a series of two-dimensional images formed