by Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | August 26, 2015 02:00pm ET
The 3D cyberportrayal of a newfound millipede looks like it hopped from the screen of James Cameron's "Avatar," with a blue body and alien appearance to boot.
The 1.5-inch-long (3.8 centimeters) millipede was discovered in Andalusia in Spain, in 2005. It lives in the dirt underneath stones and leaf litter — a decomposer that "acts as an important component of soil fauna," said study lead researcher Nesrine Akkari, the curator of the Myriapoda Collection at the Museum of Natural History in Vienna.
After preserving the specimen in a jar of ethanol for several years, the researchers decided to introduce it to the scientific world in a novel way. Newfound species are typically photographed, illustrated or put under a microscope, but in this case — for the first time — the researchers used X-ray microtomography (micro-CT) to study it.
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