Historical, archaeological, and paleontological artifacts are precious. And often preciously small: a 500-millimeter fossil fragment, 2 milligrams of charcoal from a prehistoric fire. Decoding the chemical composition of a material—especially things like bone, shell and teeth—can yield a wealth of information about the organism and time to which it belonged. But often studying something means dismantling it, and the thought of grinding some part of these tiny treasures into a fine powder for analysis makes museum curators cringe.
In a lab at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Conservation Institute in early spring, scientist Odile Madden fingers tortoise shell hair combs and samples of elephant tusks. She explains that one technique can differentiate between an object made out of ivory from an engendered elephant species and one made from cow horn, for example.
Hobbit origins from head to toe
Raman spectroscopy can peer into the molecular interstices of ...
