For Immediate Release
Contact: Dan Lagiovane (412) 622-3361

-or-

Lisa Rossi (412) 647-3555
University of Pittsburgh

February 28, 2006

Famous fossil to be CT scanned
Scanning part of new partnership
between Carnegie Museum of Natural History and
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Pittsburgh … To highlight how a new partnership between Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine can help advance scientific discovery, researchers from the two institutions will use a new generation computed tomography (CT) scanner to image a fossil that's already made international headlines.

The fossil was found in the spring of 2004 by Adam Striegel, a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh on a geology class field trip. , and once the find was made public in November of that year, received widespread media interest. Even "The Late Show with David Letterman" wanted Striegel to appear on the show.

When the fossil was brought to the attention of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Dr. Dave Berman, a museum paleontologist, immediately recognized the well-preserved fossil as a trematopid amphibian. Prior to this discovery, there were only two other known fossils of the same family found from Pennsylvanian (300 million years ago), yet Berman believes this find is most definitely a new genus and species.

The fossil has been given to the museum where it is being scientifically prepared (removing the bone from the rock also known as matrix) and studied.

"A CT scan is an important step in help to determine how the animal lived because it makes, in essence, the rock invisible," said Amy Henrici, a scientific preparatory at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. "We also are hoping that the scan will reveal some of the sutures between skull bones that are currently difficult to impossible to see and show bones that are currently obscured by matrix. We don't want to reemove this matrix because it may cause damage to the skull."

The CT scan should provide clear images of the sutures, which will aid museum researchers in distinguishing the fossil from other trematopids --a group of land-loving, flesh-eating creatures that some believe gave rise to modern frogs. The scan may also show the internal structure of its nasal area. To see this structure, useful in seeing several feature characteristics of trematopids, the rock would need to be removed in the external nares, which would be a time consuming and risky task.

The specimen was an animal living in the Pennsylvanian Period about 300 million years ago. It has some characteristics of a crocodile, but it is more like a large modern amphibian. Its most prominent feature is the large, spiky teeth, probably used to tear its food to pieces. There is still much more that needs to be studied, hopefully aided greatly by the CT scan, before a scientific paper can be written describing the creature and giving it a name.

This is not the first specimen scanned for the museum in collaboration with the Pitt School of Medicine. Douglas Robertson, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of radiology at the School of Medicine and director of the musculoskeletal imaging and biomechanics lab at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who is scanning the skull, imaged aspine and pelvis of Camptosaurus, a Jurassic dinosaur, in December 2005. Researchers hoped to digitally extract the ossified tendons and axial skeleton so it could be viewed intact as a 3-D image. The pelvis and tail was removed from its matrix to be exhibited for the museum's Dinosaurs in Their World expansion project. Though they have been preserved in this specimen, fully preparing the spine from the matrix will destroy these tendons and be forever lost to the scientific community.

Scientists will now use the 3-D scan to reconstruct the epaxial muscles and create a 3-D computer model with the skeletal elements.

# # #