'Invisible' Dino-Era Bugs Revealed By X-Ray

Galvasean

A pretty cool X-ray technique has made it possible to see images of fossilized bugs that got trapped in amber during the Cretaceous period. The amber itself was too murky to properly view the fossils and to crack open the amber would damage them. Specimens include flies, cockroaches and a type of millipede. You can view pictures of them al in startling detail here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/photogalleries/amber-bugs-unlocked/index.html

Graeme Stemp-Morlock wrote:

This ancient fly, dubbed Trichomyia lengleti, is one of a handful of bugs added to a new online database of "digital fossils."

Paleontologists from the European Synchrotron Research Facility in France used high-energy x-rays to peer inside 640 pieces of opaque, fossilized amber that date to the Cretaceous period, 145 to 65 million years ago.

The fossils were found in 2008 in from the Charentes region of southwestern France. Until recently, fossils inside opaque amber were invisible to paleontologists. But the new accelerator technology revealed unprecedented views of 350 previously invisible insects, animals, and plantswhich could previously only be studied from fossilized mud imprints.

Using x-rays for paleontology is a new and important technique for seeing inside fossils that you cant cut or break open, said researcher Paul Tafforeau.

"When we are dealing with fossils we have to study them, but we also have to preserve them."