carson's craniums??

By day I work on NASA websites to make scientific data more accessible to people around the globe. By night, I 3d print fossils.

I guess some people are content to read about fossils in books, or look at them from behind the glass of a museum, but for me there is something magical about being able to actually hold one, to see it in your hands. I bought my first fossil replicas when I was barely out of high school, and they were...not great. They cost a crazy amount of money for my college student budget, and they were closer to being an artist's interpretation of a fossil than anything approaching a faithful reproduction.

But they were better than nothing, and they've sat proudly on my wall for a decade. Anyway, sometime last year I got the itch to have some that were truly accurate. These days, if you want a genuinely museum quality replica, the undisputed king is Bone Clones. They make what I think are objectively the best replicas around, but they charge prices to match.

So although I really like hominin fossil replicas, I also really like having money in my bank account. I didn't get that mechanical engineering degree for nothing though, so I turned to 3d printing. It turns out, museums and researchers will often make scans of famous fossils publicly available, and I went down the rabit hole fast. I spent literally months downloading models, repairing meshes in blender, accurately scaling them based on original research measurements, and meticulously hand-painting them to match the original fossils.

Soon enough my friends were asking for their own copies, but hand-painting every detail was just not something I could keep up with. So I started designing multi-color versions that would show the sutures and areas where there were missing fragments. Then I started making informative stands for them to sit on so they would look nice on a shelf. And of course then I was obsessing over nozzle sizes and print settings and filament colors and cooling temperatures and sheet textures and on and on.

I never really intended to make a business, I just wanted high-quality replicas for my own collection. But before I knew it I had a whole product line.

Today, I'm still just a dude in my second-floor apartment with two 3d printers spending way too much time making skulls. This has always been a passion project for me, and I really love the idea of people having access to our shared history for a price they can actually afford.

So please, take a look around the site and see if there is anything you would like to make your own.

PS: Send me an email if you're an educator and want a full set. If you want these for your classroom, I'd love to give you an education discount.