Thursday, October 25, 2007

UT Austin CT Facility

I'm pretty busy this week but here's an update from Eric Snively who stayed in Austin after the SVP to do some CT work at UT:

The CT facility at the University of Texas at Austin (CT at UT) has benefitted palaeo- and neontology since it came into operation 10 years ago. At this year's SVP meeting, Drs. Matt Colbert and Jessie Maisano held a workshop with enlightening guidance for CT scanning, at Austin and elsewhere. They also scanned Gobekko cretacicus skulls for Aaron Bauer (Villanova University), Magdalena Borsuk-Bialynicka (Polish Academy of Sciences), and myself.

Here are photographs of the operation behind so much great science and imagery. Not depicted are the facility's official Palaeoblog awards for Best Music and Coolest Work Lighting of any CT lab anywhere.


CT wrangler Dr. Matt Colbert prepares specimens for scanning
in the giant brown box to the right, built by Bio-Imaging Research.


The scanner itself consists in part of a detector (left), turntable on which smaller specimens are placed (middle), and x-ray source (right).


Much fancier monitors than previously. (I'm sure Eric is referring to the computer moniters!)