CHICAGO (AP) — Scientists at Chicago’s Field Museum have removed the right forelimb of the institution’s famous T. rex fossil named Sue.
The Chicago Tribune reports that the bones are headed to the suburban Argonne National Laboratory to be part of research into the long-debated question of why a T. rex had a forelimb.
The goal is to find signs of stress in the bones’ cellular structure that would show to what degree the T. rex had used them.
Beginning Saturday, Carmen Soriano, the laboratory’s paleontologist, will put Sue’s radius and ulna, the two main forelimb bones, before a scanner that’s typically used to look at barely visible things. Soriano says the X-ray will generate a 3-D image of the arm bones, both inside and out, down to the cellular level.
Sue’s bones will return to the museum Tuesday.
