I’ve spent a lot of my life on the interface
between science and art.
Understanding shape in an aesthetic way, presenting
these skeletons in a visually arresting way,
often leads to new insights.
Why do I like that angle, why do I like that
colormap?
I like that colormap because it’s bringing
out some detail that I later realize is really important.
If it took between, say, four and ten hours
to scan a fish with exquisite detail,
you’d spend more than a career scanning 33,000 of them.
The big innovation here was the idea to do lots
of species at the same time.
What we do is we package as many as 20 species
of fishes all at once into a sort-of fish burrito
and then pot them in the micro CT
scanner and get data from all of them all  at once.
I’ve scanned three times as many fish in
the last few months as I’d scanned in the
previous 15 years.
This is an amount information that is just
awe inspiring and it really does represent
a huge increase in our body of knowledge about
one of the most diverse and important group
of vertebrates on the planet.
