A $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant will fund a four-year project to scan 20,000 vertebrate specimens to comprise a free digital encyclopedia available to the public.
Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and LSU Museum of Natural Science curator Christopher Austin is a principal investigator of the grant, along with Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences Jake Esselstyn.
“It provides an incredible window into the internal as well as the external morphology of these specimens,” Austin said. “It allows us to get much more detail than we would ever be able to do before with just regular X-rays or other classic approaches.”
This new technology will be beneficial not only to scientists, but also students, educators and the general public. CT scanning is a non-destructive technology that bombards a specimen with X-rays from every angle, creating thousands of snapshots that a computer stitches together into a detailed 3-D visual replica that can be virtually dissected, layer by layer, to expose cross-sections and internal structures. The scans allow scientists to view a specimen inside and out — its skeleton, muscles, internal organs, parasites, even its stomach contents — without touching a scalpel, according to a news release.
The main role of the LSU Museum of Natural Science is to contribute specimens.The museum currently houses about 130,000 amphibians and reptiles.
“So you can imagine looking at the smallest vertebrate in the world through a microscope and how difficult it is to look at its internal morphology,” Austin said. “There were ways in which we did it, but the CT scanning approach is going to be incredibly useful for trying to figure out what’s going with changes in morphology and describing new species of these really small frogs.”
With virtual access to specimens, researchers could peel away the skin of a passenger pigeon to glimpse its circulatory system, a class of third graders could determine a copperhead’s last meal, undergraduate students could 3-D print and compare skulls across a range of frog species and a veterinarian could plan a surgery on a giraffe at a zoo, according to a news release.
Sixteen research institutions included in the grant are LSU Museum of Natural Science; the University of Florida; the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University; the California Academy of Sciences; Cornell University; the Field Museum of Natural History; Harvard University; the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California,San Diego; Texas A&M University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Kansas; the University of Michigan; the University of Texas, Austin; the University of Washington; the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and Yale University, according to a news release.
“Typically scientists will come to the museum to look at morphology of some New Guinea skinks or we will send specimens to Israel, Virginia or wherever for scientists to have access to them, but those things take a lot of time and effort, things get lost in the mail and that’s a real tragedy,” Austin said. “This is really the forefront of the next generation of museum biology in terms of getting this information from a handful of these specimens, I think about 80 percent of all vertebrate genera.”

Gallery • 4 Photos

Dilyn Stewart

Curator of LSU Museum of Natural Science and professor for the Department of Biological Sciences Christopher Austin shows off the world's smallest frog species in the basement of Foster Hall on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2017.