75-million-year-old fossil gets CT scan

Many of us are familiar with a CT scan, a medical process that uses a computer to give us a three-dimensional image.

But the picture taken Friday at Power Pet Emergency & Specialty isn’t capturing human or pet body parts; it’s scanning the skull of a Corythosaurus.

“I knew it was something really special,” Jared Hudson said.

Hudson, from Custer, SD, collects and studies Cretaceous dinosaurs and so do his friends. He just happened to call his buddies on the day they made the discovery.

“The skull was eroding out of a stone edge, so we dug in, actually took equipment in and took the hill down and found one illium, which is part of the hip and two tail vertebrae,” Hudson said.

It’s the most complete specimen of it’s kind. The duck-billed dinosaur is 75 million years old. That’s why Hudson and fellow fossil technicians want to use technology to preserve and study the skull.

“Before if we had an articulated skeleton, if all the bones were put together, we wouldn’t have been able to pull those apart to show you everything. Now, we can do that all in the computer digitally while maintaining the integrity of the original fossil,” Jacob Jett said.

The 3D image will allow scientists to restore the skull fully – rather than risk damaging it or guessing how all of the parts fit together. It also opens the door for further education about the species.

“This will help us open up our range of possibilities for what we can put on display with a nice, highly accurate, lots of detail kind of exhibit,” Jett said.

Right now, the skull is traveling between institutions in the country for study.