There are, by the most recent counts, only a handful of vaquitas left alive in the wild. The small porpoise, found nowhere but Mexico’s northern Gulf of California, has been pushed to the edge of extinction largely as bycatch in gillnets set illegally for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is trafficked for use in traditional medicine. No amount of digital science can reverse that trajectory on its own. But a team of US researchers has just made sure that, whatever happens to the species in the wild, a complete record of its anatomy will survive — openly, permanently, and freely accessible to anyone.
A 1966 skeleton, scanned for the first time
The specimen at the center of the project is a complete female vaquita skeleton collected in 1966 by NOAA Fisheries biologist Robert L. Brownell Jr. and held ever since in the collections of the San Diego Natural History Museum. In a study published in Marine Mammal Science (DOI: 10.1111/mms.70162), a multi-institution team describes putting that skeleton through medical CT, micro-CT, and digital photography — capturing structures down to the scale of microns, finer than the width of a human hair.
The work was led by imaging lab assistant Jamie Knaub and project lead Brittany Aja Dolan (formerly of SeaWorld California), with San Diego Natural History Museum curator Philip Unitt, senior author and Florida Atlantic University professor Marianne E. Porter, and Tricia L. Meredith, director of FAU’s Berlin Family Bioimaging Lab. The project drew on four institutions: Florida Atlantic University, the San Diego Natural History Museum, SeaWorld California, and NOAA Fisheries — and was supported by FAU’s School of Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sustainability (ECOS), the Joshua M. Berlin Research Gift, FAU Laboratory Schools, and SeaWorld California.
Why an open repository, not a museum drawer
What makes this more than a routine imaging study is where the data ended up. Instead of sitting on a lab server, the resulting 3D models were uploaded to MorphoSource, an open-access repository built specifically for 3D and volumetric specimen data. Anyone — a researcher in another country, a museum without its own CT scanner, a student, a curious member of the public — can now rotate and examine the vaquita’s full skeleton from any angle, at resolution the original bones could never safely offer to that many hands.
That distinction matters for a species this rare. A physical skeleton can only be examined by researchers with the funding and access to travel to San Diego, and every physical handling carries some risk to an irreplaceable specimen. A properly deposited, openly licensed digital model removes both constraints at once. It is the same logic that underpins open data-sharing standards across research more broadly: a repository is only as useful as its openness, its permanence, and its discoverability — the three things MorphoSource is explicitly built to provide for specimen-based biology.
A record, not a recovery
It’s worth being precise about what this project does and doesn’t represent. The vaquita’s wild population has not stabilized or rebounded; conservation estimates continue to put the number of surviving individuals in the single digits, and the gillnet bycatch pressure driving the decline has not been resolved. This project doesn’t change that. What it does is guarantee that even if the species disappears from the wild, its anatomy — skeletal structure, morphology, the physical record of what a vaquita actually was — persists in a form future researchers can still study, teach from, and compare against related species, indefinitely and without depending on a single physical specimen surviving intact.
That reframes digital repositories like MorphoSource as something closer to a permanent-record infrastructure for biodiversity than a convenience for current researchers. For a species functionally down to a handful of individuals, an open, redundant, freely accessible digital archive may end up being one of the most consequential outputs of the entire research effort.
The open-data principle behind the story
The vaquita project is a specimen-biology example of a pattern that shows up across research data management generally: raw data generated for one study becomes far more valuable when deposited somewhere openly accessible, well-described, and built to outlast the original grant or lab. Whether the data is a CT scan of an endangered porpoise, a genomic dataset, or a set of survey instruments, the underlying principle is the same one behind FAIR data practices and dedicated repositories more broadly — findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data compounds in value the longer it stays available and the more contexts it gets reused in.
Source
Primary source: Knaub, J. et al., Marine Mammal Science, DOI 10.1111/mms.70162 (published June 2026). Secondary coverage: ScienceDaily.
