ABOVE: Various crocodile fossils in the paleontology collection at the Nairobi National Museum
COURTESY OF JOB KIBII AND THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF KENYA
The paleontology collection at the Nairobi National Museum is so vast that the bones of an extinct lion-like carnivore larger than a polar bear went unnoticed for three decades. And they’re so old, there’s a chance whenever curator Job Kibii opens a drawer that the creature inside may be the earliest known of its kind.
The museum’s fossils, the majority of which span a time period from recent times to more than 25 million years ago, are sometimes encased in rock, which pristinely preserves details but obscures parts of specimens. To look beneath the surface without destroying a sample, scientists typically look to high-resolution X-ray microtomography (micro-CT) scans, which allow them to build 3-D reconstructions of fossils at a microscopic scale.
Numerous micro-CT scanners exist in the Western ...
