An entire woolly mammoth tusk's worth of CT images were successfully obtained by researchers. Using a more recent clinical CT scanner, scientists could scan the tusk completely.
The new technology eliminates the need for numerous partial scans and enables large-scale imaging.
Woolly Mammoth
PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images
The extinct woolly mammoth inhabited North America and Eurasia and measured the size of an African elephant in the present day.
They are a member of the same order as modern elephants along with other extinct mammoths, mastodons, and gomphotheres.
Mammoths had small, fur-covered ears and a tail to prevent frostbite. They also had tusks, which they employed for fighting, digging for food, and removing bark from trees.
Scanning inside the woolly mammoth tusk
According to Tilo Niemann, M.D., head of CT, cardiac, and thoracic radiology in the Department of Radiology at Kantonsspital Baden in Baden, Switzerland, working with priceless fossils is difficult because it's crucial not to harm or destroy the specimen, as per ScienceDaily.
Even though there are many imaging techniques to assess the internal structure, it was not possible to scan an entire tusk without fragmenting it or at the very least having to conduct numerous scans that had to be meticulously put together.
The ring or cylinder that a patient, or in this case, the tusk, is positioned into on more recent CT scanners has larger gantries.
The tusk that the researchers looked at was unearthed by the Canton Zug's office of heritage and archaeology in central Switzerland.
The tusk measures 206 centimeters in total or almost 7 feet. Its basal diameter, or size at the base, is 16 cm, or just over 6 inches. When the object's helical, or spiral, curvature is considered, the overall diameter is 80 cm or slightly more than 2.5 feet.
Cementum, a substance resembling bone, and dentin, which lies beneath the cementum and makes up most of the tusk's mass, are the two main types of material that makeup tusks.
The base of the tusk has a cone that was most recently formed, just before the mammoth died.
The first cone a mammoth makes forms the tip of the tusk.
The intermediate cones develop over the course of the mammoth's existence.
A mysterious instrument made of the mammoth tusk was carved by a stone-age toolmaker forty thousand years ago.
The ivory strip is twenty centimeters long and has four predrilled holes in it, each of which is lined with a carefully cut spiral incision.
When this unusual device was found in the Hohle Fels cave in southwest Germany several years ago, its function was unknown, as per The Guardian.
However, researchers now believe it to be the oldest known method of making rope, and it would have had a revolutionary effect.
The resulting ropes might have been used to create clothing, food containers, bows and arrows, snares and traps, fishing nets, and more.
Heavy items like sleds could be pulled by ropes, and spear points could be fastened to poles.
These were developed by some of the earliest Homo sapiens to leave Africa and arrive in Europe about 60,000 years ago.
Their artwork's complexity provides insight into how advanced our ancestors had become.
A Paleolithic materials specialist from the University of Liege in Belgium, Veerle Rots, fed raw plant fibers through the holes in a bronze replica of an ivory instrument and also was able to create four distinct twisted strands that could be combined to form a rope.
