Many of us are happy to spend hours  at a time playing video games.

Whether they’re console or PC,  first-person shooters or farming sims, there’s a game out there for just about anyone. But there’s a secret behind the technology  that makes these games possible, and it has nothing to do  with your leaderboard stats.

Because the same software that makes  some of the most popular video games has another unexpected application:  Helping paleontologists learn about animals that roamed the Earth millions of years ago. [♪ INTRO] We’re mostly going to talk  about a program called Blender, and chances are, you’ve seen stuff that  was made with this software before. It’s a free, open source 3D modeling  software used in films, TV shows and, most notably, video games. The studio that makes popular games  like Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, and more uses Blender on their projects,  so you may have seen it in action.

But gaming isn’t the only thing  the software makes possible. It’s also used to study fossils. Lots of paleontologists rely on 3D  graphics software to make virtual fossils, which are exactly what they sound like.

You take high-quality CT or  surface scans of a fossil, upload them into the software, and boom! Virtual replica of a piece of history. Over the past few decades, this technology has made it a lot  easier to be a paleontologist.

As computers have gotten cheaper and 3D  interfaces have gotten easier to use, virtual fossils have allowed  modern paleontologists to do things they never  dreamed of a few decades ago. At the simplest level, the  technology gives researchers access to more specimens than it’s  possible to see in-person. If a researcher in Kansas wants  to examine a fossil in a German natural history museum, it's not so  easy to just pop by to have a look.

However, if there are CT scans of that  particular specimen, the data can be plugged into 3D modeling software and  shared with lots of people at once. So that paleontologist in Kansas  doesn’t have to brush up on her German. Plus, it’s super easy to 3D  print the virtual fossil, either in actual size, or one that’s larger  than life, to really get a look at the details.

Or you can go miniature, in case you want a little fossil friend  to hang out on your desk, or something. Virtual fossils are also important  in preserving the fossils themselves, because analysis can be hard on a specimen. And let’s face it, fossils can be very fragile.

One researcher famously destroyed an  especially precious fossil back in 1961. The fossil was the holotype of its species,  and it was the first one ever found. And in order to study the details of its skull, the researcher cut the fossil into slices  manually, and drew each slice on paper.

And yeah, he did learn a lot about  the anatomy of the animal’s skull. But it was the first and only fossil of  the species that they had at the time, so when it was gone, that was it. They tried to preserve a copy by  making a wax cast of the fossil, but unfortunately wax is soft,  and that cast deformed over time.

And the thing is, a modern CT scan can  produce images just like those slices, but without actually cutting into anything. So these days, we can get just as much  information, without the bone saw. If only they’d waited a few decades.

Not only do virtual fossils help  researchers retire some destructive methods, but they make it possible to  run all kinds of experiments that aren’t possible with physical fossils alone. For instance, researchers can experiment  on the digital model of the fossil to figure out how the organism  might have moved when it was alive. One 2019 paper investigated the  movements of an ancient tetrapod called Orobates, which lived in the Permian,  between 280 and 290 million years ago.

They were able to use scans  of an incredible fossil in order to simulate the range of  motion at each joint of the fossil. Then compared that information  with fossil footprints, which told them exactly how this animal  would have been able to move and walk when it was alive, hundreds  of millions of years ago. And a 2021 paper did a similar  reconstruction of bite force.

The researchers took  measurements of virtual fossils and ran calculations based on the  different properties of tooth tissues. See, teeth aren’t just made of one thing. They’ve got layers.

And those layers have different strengths,  meaning that if you run calculations as though the tooth is all  enamel, your math will be wrong. So their bite force reconstructions  that took these factors into account were way more accurate, and they wouldn't have been possible  without 3D modeling technology. It's even possible to reconstruct damaged fossils, and then 3D print the fixed-up version.

In 2022, a study reported their success with  repairing a distorted fossil in Blender, using a tool called “armature”  to slowly manipulate the surface of the fossil into the right shape. Kind of like un-crumpling a sheet  of paper, one fold at a time. And they not only ended up with  a complete fossil to look at, but because Blender saved each manipulation  of the fossil, they could study exactly how the fossil got from  perfect point A to messed-up point B.

Studying that process is called taphonomy,  and it’s really important to understand so we know how fossils get so  messed up in the first place. So the same software that helped the  artists behind some of your favorite video games is also a key part of how you  can learn about your favorite fossils! Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow.

And if you’ve got any younger folks in your life and you want to share the science knowledge,  we’ve got just the channel for you. Over at SciShow Kids, our host  Jessi and resident robo-rat Squeaks learn all about the world we live in with  the help of a whole bunch of friends. For instance, we’ve got a whole  set of episodes all about dinosaurs and other ancient critters  that once roamed the earth.

If you know anyone that  might like to explore science with the help of this awesome crew,  send them over to SciShow Kids! [♪ OUTRO]