X-Rays Reveal Rare Croc's Insides

By Megan Gannon, News Editor | April 03, 2014 02:43pm ET

For the past 15 years, anatomist Larry Witmer has been going through the back door of the O'Bleness Hospital in Athens, Ohio, pushing coolers stuffed with dead animals into the CT scanning room. He has brought in ostriches, slain rhinoceroses and rare kiwis. Last week, Witmer arrived with an 8.5-foot-long (2.6 meters) Siamese crocodile.

Witmer has dozens, sometimes hundreds, of animals in his freezer at Ohio University at any given time. He chose his car (a Ford Edge) based on its capacity to fit his unusual cargo. ("My wife is very forgiving," he says.) He primarily studies the evolution of organs in the skulls of dinosaurs, but unfortunately the fossil record doesn't give him much to work with — just the bones and teeth, not muscles, nerves, brain tissue or skin.

"As a biologist, I want to understand how they worked as living, breathing creatures," Witmer told Live Science. The closest approximation of preserved dinosaur soft tissue comes from dinosaurs' closest extant cousins: birds and crocodilians. That's why Witmer recently jumped on the chance to study a rare Siamese crocodile, thought to be in its 30s, that died of natural causes last year at a park called Alligator Adventure in North Myrtle Beach, S.C.

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Scientists film inside a flying insect

By Victoria Gill

Science reporter, BBC News

Scientists from the UK and Switzerland have used very intense X-rays to film inside an insect's body as it flies.

The resulting footage - a 3D reconstruction made up of several X-ray snapshots - shows a blowfly's flight motor, the "muscles and hinges" that power flight.

Researchers say the insights could be useful for the design of micro air vehicles.

The results are published in the journal Plos Biology.

Dr Simon Walker from the University of Oxford's animal flight group, first author of the research, explained that the team used very fast, intense X-rays to record the extremely rapid movements. In the time that it takes a human to blink, a blowfly can beat its wings 50 times.

"The X-rays were also focused on to a very small area, which was necessary to achieve high-resolution of such a small object," Dr Walker told BBC News. "The blowfly thorax is about 4mm long."

The scientists tethered the tiny fly to a vertical mount, which they rotated as the insect was X-rayed.

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19th century fish attends Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital for x-ray

A large 19th century fish made an unusual appearance at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital's radiography department when it was brought in for an x-ray.

Staff from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in Exeter enlisted the help of the hospital in order to see inside the ocean sunfish before beginning important conservation work on the specimen.

The fish was x-rayed early in the morning before patient appointments began.

The 127 year old specimen was caught in the Exe Estuary, donated to the Museum, and was stuffed by the Museum’s first curator, William D'Urban.

At some point in its history, a large piece of wire had been inserted, which the museum staff would like to remove in order to conserve the specimen.

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X-ray scans look at changes inside a chrysalis

By Ella Davies, Reporter, BBC Nature

Scientists have recorded the intimate changes involved when a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly.

Researchers used micro-CT scans to look inside a chrysalis during the process of metamorphosis.

A series of images revealed how the caterpillar's breathing tubes altered to become the intricate respiratory system of a butterfly.

The assembled footage features in the BBC Four documentary Metamorphosis: The Science of Change.

"We use this 3D imaging technology in archaeology to analyse the internal structure of objects such as bones and pottery, but it works just as well for small bodies with complex internal anatomy like a chrysalis," said archaeologist Professor Kate Robson Brown, from the University of Bristol, who was part of the team that undertook the study.

The researchers scanned three stages in the life cycle of the blue morphos (Morpho menelaus) butterfly: a caterpillar one day before metamorphosis, a week-old chrysalis and a chrysalis one day before the butterfly emerged from within.

They used micro-CT (computerised tomography) technology, firing x-rays at the insects to generate a computer image of their insides.

Video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/21714465