In collaboration
with Tim Rowe and Richard Ketcham at the University of Texas at
Austin, I am looking at the mineralization pattern of the chondrocranium
of extant elasmobranchs. Computed tomography, essentially a 3-dimensional
x-ray, allows me to compare the hard tissue components of different
cartilaginous fishes at various stages of development.
As part of
our research on how cartilaginous fishes crush
hard prey we have developed a few simple MatLab
programs for analysing CT-scans.
The UT
Austin group has a web site, and many of the images, including
movies of the 3-d scans are available at Digital
Morphology for teaching purposes.
