The above might not look like much, but this project is so cool. It’s from Fast Co., and I really can’t tell it any better, so without further ado, in their words:

Scientists employ all sorts of techniques to introduce us to extinct animals in the context of a museum, but for the most part, those techniques are largely visual. We usually don’t get to learn how they smelled, for example, or how their skin felt, ignoring a whole range of senses during what should be a transformative experience. Filling in those gaps is the quest of Royal College of Art grad student Marguerite Humeau, who became fascinated with the idea of creating reproductions of the vocal tracts of extinct animals to bring them back to life through sound.

As she embarked upon her research, she learned a curious fact about the recovery of extinct animals: Because the vocal tract is made of soft tissue, it does not fossilize. The data she was looking for, like 3-D scans of the vocal tract and windpipe, simply did not exist. “When I discovered that, it became a personal obsession. I had to recreate this data in some way,” she tells Co.Design.

For six months, Humeau studied with paleontologists, zoologists, veterinarians, engineers, explorers, surgeons, ear and throat specialists, and radiologists — over 100 specialists — in an effort to recreate the chords of a Mammoth Imperator, an ancestor of the better-known woolly mammoth. For the resonance cavities, for example, she had to get a CT scan of a relative: a modern-day Asian elephant. For the windpipe and lungs, she spoke to elephant vocalization specialists. In the end, Humeau was able to build a massive compilation of data that did not exist before her research, she says. “I created bridges between areas of science which normally would not be related.”

…For the rest of the article (it’s fascinating!), click here.

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