Tuesday, March 30, 2010

[UV, FL] Enhancing the visibility of fossil cephalopods soft tissue structures

I had the honor to work with Neal Larson (yeah, THAT Neal Larson who discovered SUE, the T-Rex, with his brother Peter) on a paper on fossilized cephalopods found in Hajoula, Lebanon. I used my remapping technology consisting of a visible image (A), a UV stimulated visible fluorescence image (B) to enhance the visibility of preserved soft tissue structures (C) by combining them into one multispectral image.

Should someone be interested in the paper, the full title is:
"A new look at fossil cephalopods", NEAL L. LARSON, ROBERT W. MORTON, PETER L. LARSON AND UWE BERGMANN in
Tanabe, K., Shigeta, Y., Sasaki, T. & Hirano, H. (eds.) 2010. Cephalopods - Present and Past, Tokai University Press, Tokyo, p. 303-314.

Images (c) Neal L Larson and Dr Klaus Schmitt

[click on image to see a larger one]




Another example of the same technique, shots I did with a squid fossil I have here from the Upper Cretaceous period, ca 90 million years old.

Visible light image:

UV stimulated visible fluorescence: 

multispectral remapped 


There is a follow up to this one HERE.

Stay tuned, more will follow on that fascinating subject...

More info on this very interesting field may be found on my site http://www.pbase.com/kds315/uv_photos