3D scans reveal deep-sea anglerfish's huge final meal | Natural History Museum

it's incredibly rare so little is known about them it lives very deep below a thousand meters call that a hairy angler fish because it has these long bristly fin rays that make it look quite hairy we have only one specimen in our collection it's the biggest one that's ever been found one of the reasons why it looks quite big is it has a very big bulging stomach and we're fascinated to know what's inside we don't want to cut it open because it's such a rare specimen we don't want to damage it foreign [Music] bony jaw of the fish and it curls around and then the tail there [Music] the CT scans like a three-dimensional x-ray so we can look at the Islamic contents from every angle and we can examine it in a lot more detail [Music] you can see this this is the mouth of the angler fish with some teeth these are just preliminary shots and once we've actually scanned the specimen and reconstructed the data we should be able to see this in a full 3d volume [Music] foreign use of the CT scanner is to be able to look really intimately into the insides of an animal but without doing any damage to it oh yeah that ball thing is one of its signs is that the eye of the anglerfish up here okay there's its mouth and it's his teeth he probably ate it head first because this thing probably came in to look at the light that the anger fish has and then the anger fish grabbed it and then sort of swallowed it in its stomach has expanded to sort of fit it all in and these bright bits here that seem to be a lot more dense than the rest of the bone they're the ear bones they call them otoliths and they're very distinctive they've got very unique diagnostic features so it might be possible to tell exactly what species It Is by getting a good look at those [Music] we were able to get a really lovely image of the prey fishes and oat lifts we sent that to the world expert motorless and that gave us a real helping hand with the whole investigation and it's reliner a tritter the soft skins move head here at the Natural History Museum we have one of the biggest and best collections of deep sea and mid-water Fishes from the Atlantic in the world and so of course we already have specimens of rulina atrita they've been a bit bashed up during the capture but this gives you a rough idea of the size and sort of General shape of the fish inside the anglerfish and you can see looking at it some of the features that are obvious on the scan you can see the the big eye with the big lens in the middle it's a bit like I don't want to bend it too much but it's sort of like that inside everything fits the size fits all the the fin Ray counts fit and most importantly and this is the thing that narrows it down to the exact species it's the number of bones in its backbone we ended up having to scan the specimen three times but the final results we got were so beautiful that it was worth it now when people ask what's inside his stomach I can give them a definite answer [Music]

Channel: Natural History Museum

Views: 5,246,590

Keywords: Natural History Museum, research, science, nature, geology, evolution, biology, 3d, anglerfish, x-ray, angle fish

Id: AW93uB5fDLQ

Length: 4min 27sec (267 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2013