Stanford University's School of Medicine recently ran CT scans on a pair of Greco-Roman crocodile mummies. The scans of the two crocodiles, both around 2,000 years old, will help researchers at UC Berkeley's Hearst Museum study what's inside the bandages and how the mummies were constructed. Last year, the same scanning technology was used to study a 2,500 year-old mummy of a priest. (You can see video of that process here.) From the SCOPE blog:
The crocodiles, a wrapped mummy with a painted mask and an unwrapped mummy with a pack of offspring on its back, are part of a larger museum collection of Egyptian objects excavated in the early 1900s that will be on exhibit next month…
The mummies were first scanned at Stanford Medicine Imaging Center and then again at the School of Medicine's Radiological Sciences Laboratory.
Stanford physicist Rebecca Fahrig, PhD, explains why this approach was selected:The scanner in my lab provides much higher resolution than the clinical CT scanner, on the order of 200 microns instead of 600 microns from the clinical scanner. It is possible to see smaller things using these C-arm CT images than using the clinical CT scanner. The system also provides another advantage – during the scanning process we get to see very high-resolution projection (or 2-D) images of the object being scanned. During the scanning of one of the crocodiles, we noticed something in the projection images from the C-arm system that we had not seen in the clinical CT images – a fish hook. We were then able to do a very high-resolution reconstruction of the fish hook, and see details about the shape and construction of the hook.
"Ancient crocodile mummies scanned at Stanford"
