Yesterday was an exciting day here: we completed the first CT scan on our new departmental CT scanner, a Nikon XT H 225ST, which is being run by me (Selena), Matt Friedman (Earth & Environmental Sciences and Museum of Paleontology), and Brian Ellis (Civil & Environmental Engineering) in the CTEES (Computed Tomography in Earth & Environmental Sciences) facility. We’ve been eagerly waiting for months to have everything in place and be able to start using the machine, and yesterday was the day!

In true maize & blue spirit, Scan #0001 is the skull of a wolverine (Gulo gulo) from the Museum of Zoology collections. We were pretty happy with it and are looking forward to scanning a bunch rocks, plants, and animals!

Here’s the reconstructed of the skull, which will be 3D printed for a college function.

Here is the skull getting ready to go into the scanner

A radiograph image of the skull (nose and teeth towards bottom). The machine captures thousands of these images as the specimen is rotated 360 degrees, and then algorithms are used to convert them in the tomograms. The tomograms are then imported into software that allows them to be looked at in 3D.

Matt is starting the reconstruction process, looking at one possible tomogram as the various settings are optimized so that artifacts (like the streaks) in the image are minimized.