When chance brought a lone crustacean to a scientist’s car park in the USA, he had an unusual response: try to get an exceptionally detailed 3D scan of the animal.
“I was on my way to work when my daughter happened to notice a crawfish in our parking lot,” says Rogério Gomes dos Santos, a light microscopy specialist at Louisiana State University (LSU). “I have no idea how it ended up there, but I believe it may have fallen from someone’s grocery bag.”
Most people wouldn’t know how to deal with this situation but Gomes dos Santos immediately sprung into action. “He did what any good scientist would do,” says LSU Research on Instagram. “He placed it into the micro-CT scanner of the LSU Advanced Microscopy and Analytical Core (AMAC)!”
Micro-computed tomography (microCT) scanners create exceptionally detailed, high resolution scans. Gomes dos Santos and the team scanned the crawfish (also known as a crayfish or crawdad, depending on where you're from) to create pictures of an astonishingly comprehensive image. “We bet you’ve never seen a crawfish in this much detail,” says LSU.
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