#CHIMPANZEE HAND X RAY SKIN#
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When he died in 2015 at age 29, suffering from cataracts and other signs of age, he was the oldest of his kind. A fat-tailed dwarf lemur named Jonas is one of them. Yapuncich has scanned the remains of more than 100 animals so far.

With standard microCT researchers can visualize hard tissues such as bones and teeth, but by using special iodine-based stains, they can also see soft tissues such as muscles, nerves and blood vessels in the deceased animals. Imaging cadavers makes it possible to perform “virtual” dissections that would never be allowed on living animals. The Duke Lemur Center is committed to studying lemurs without harming them. He can also look at any 2-D slice to see internal structures in cross section.

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With the click of a mouse, he digitally dissects away Beauty’s fur, skin and soft tissue to reveal the skeleton underneath in stunning, three-dimensional detail. It’s a 3-D close-up of Beauty’s head built from 1,900 cross-sectional images. Yapuncich peers at the result on a nearby computer screen. The data are sent to a computer, which uses the images to reconstruct two-dimensional cross sections of Beauty’s insides, and these are stacked like slices of bread into a 3-D model.

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The scanner takes thousands of snapshots for each full rotation. The X-rays that pass through Beauty’s body hit a detector on the back wall, which records a snapshot. The microCT scanner blasts a cone-shaped beam of X-rays at the cooler as it spins slowly on a rotating platform. Inside, a Styrofoam cooler filled with dry ice contains the frozen remains of Beauty, a female bamboo lemur that died in 1985. On the ground floor of the Fitzpatrick Building stands a giant lead-lined box, installed in 2013 with startup funds from Boyer, which looks like an airport security scanner. Yapuncich demonstrated how the technology works at Duke’s Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility. Virtual Dissection: No Scalpel, No Forceps “Once I had a specimen on loan, I tended to scan the whole thing.” “It seemed like a waste just to scan the foot and send it back,” Yapuncich said. Complete or even partial skeletons are rare. Researchers can learn about many aspects of primate biology from fossils, but most fossil specimens consist of isolated teeth or fragments of bones. He was scanning the skeletal remains of present-day primates to see if certain foot bone measurements could help to reconstruct how much their extinct relatives might have weighed. Yapuncich got the idea for the project while earning his doctorate in evolutionary anthropology. “Even when they've passed, these animals continue to contribute valuable scientific data,” said former Duke graduate student Gabe Yapuncich, who has been leading the effort to scan the specimens with Duke assistant professor Doug Boyer. Soon, anyone will be able to go online to and get 3-D views of the internal anatomy of dozens of lemurs and other rare and endangered prosimian primates, in micrometer detail, without disturbing the original specimens. Which is why, when an animal at the Duke Lemur Center dies from illness, injury or old age, a licensed veterinarian performs a postmortem exam within 24 hours of death, organs are removed, and tissue samples are collected so that other researchers can make use of them.Ĭadavers of each species are stored in freezers or preserved in formalin - not for ghoulish curiosity, but so that years from now their bodies could be still be used for research and education.Īnd though these animals are gone, their bodies are now being preserved for present and future generations with help from an X-ray imaging technique called micro-computed tomography (microCT). Thousands of people donate their bodies to science each year.īut if you study and care for endangered primates, it’s a different story.Īlmost all of the roughly 100 species of lemurs are facing extinction in the wild due to logging, mining, hunting and slash-and-burn agriculture. If you're a medical student, obtaining a human cadaver for learning anatomy or practicing surgical techniques is relatively easy.

Chimpanzee hand x ray