Between 1909 and 1913, a field expedition led by Berlin’s Natural History Museum dug a whopping 230 tons of late-Jurassic fossils out of Tanzania’s Tendaguru formation. While nearly 95 percent of the total fossil haul has been prepared and many specimens are on display in museums today, 46 original transport cases and crates from the expedition remained stowed away and unpacked for decades in museum storage.
Now 100 years later, the cases themselves are historical artifacts. To peer inside them non-invasively, researchers used medical computed tomography (CT) scans to reveal the dinosaur bones within, as well as important insights about the colonial-era dig. The results will help scientists prioritize which fossils to unpack and how to prepare them, the researchers write in a paper published in Palaeontologia Electronica.
"It was very exciting for all of us to finally know exactly what was inside the bamboo corsets without having to open them right away," says study author Daniela Schwarz, a paleontologist at Berlin’s Natural History Museum, in a press release. "Until now, there was a lot of uncertainty about how to handle this material, because physical preparation really takes a lot of time, and you also don't want to destroy historical documents of the era."
