Daniel Field wasn’t expecting to see much when he put a broken rock in a CT scanner. The University of Cambridge paleontologist and his student, Juan Benito, were looking at a donation to the Natural History Museum of Maastricht, the Netherlands, which appeared to have some prehistoric bird leg bones sticking out of it.
CT scans are a matter of course in this kind of research, Field says. The technology uses X-rays to outline 3D versions of whatever is inside scanned objects — and, in paleontology, lets researchers see through stone. When the team scanned the rock, they hoped the data would reveal more information about the limb bones.
But when Field digitally swept aside a layer of rock, staring back at him and Benito from the screen was a remarkably complete, 3D bird skull. “We almost died,” Field says.
Since then, the team has learned that, at 66.7 million ...
