This page serves supplemental imagery for a paper entitled X-ray Computed Tomography Datasets for Forensic Analysis of Vertebrate Fossils by T.B. Rowe, Z.-X. Luo, R.A. Ketcham, J.A. Maisano and M.W. Colbert (2016, Nature Scientific Data, 3, 160040). The abstract is as follows:

We describe X-ray computed tomography (CT) datasets from three specimens recovered from Early Cretaceous lakebeds of China that illustrate the forensic interpretation of CT imagery for paleontology. Fossil vertebrates from thinly bedded sediments often shatter upon discovery and are commonly repaired as amalgamated mosaics grouted to a solid backing slab of rock or plaster. Such methods are prone to inadvertent error and willful forgery, and once required potentially destructive methods to identify mistakes in reconstruction. CT is an efficient, nondestructive alternative that can disclose many clues about how a specimen was handled and repaired. These annotated datasets illustrate the power of CT in documenting specimen integrity and are intended as a reference in applying CT more broadly to evaluating the authenticity of comparable fossils.

The holotype and only known specimen of Jeholodens jenkinsi was made available for scanning by Dr. Zhe-Xi Luo, then Curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was recovered by an unknown collector in the Early Cretaceous Yixian Formation, reportedly from the Sihetun site, Liaoning Province, P. R. China, and obtained by the National Geological Museum of China.

This specimen was scanned by Richard Ketcham and Matthew Colbert on 23 April 1999 along the long axis of the slab for a total of 400 slices. Each slice is 0.25 mm thick, with an interslice spacing of 0.2 mm (resulting in an overlap of 0.05 mm between slices) and a field of reconstruction of 50 mm.

Literature

Qiang, J., Zhexi, L., and Shu-an, J. 1999. A Chinese triconodont mammal and mosaic evolution of the mammalian skeleton. Nature, 398, 326-330.

None available.