I was fascinated when I saw them under the microscope.
I was fascinated by the structures,
the different orientations.
Just they’re absolutely beautiful.
So, I found forams interesting
from a purely aesthetic point of view.
But now I’m hooked.
Because I see how important they are.
I am Bushra Hussaini and I take care of the fossil invertebrate collection.
I’m Ellen Thomas and I’m a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History.
We have a very important foram collection here,
because in the mid-20th century,
the American Museum was the focus of foram sciences.
I’m Neil Landman and I’m a curator in the Division of Paleontology.
Forams reflect environmental changes.
They’re very sensitive indicators of environmental change.
So, we have this very important foram collection
that was developed in the mid-20th century
and, you know, everything changes and curators come and go.
And so, it’s really our obligation
to rehouse and recurate the collection of microfossils,
because it’s so important.
So, we received a grant.
The main goal of this project is to rehouse the specimen slides.
The other objective is to create a digital catalog—
you know, enter them into a database,
photograph them,
and then also to create about 50 CT scans.
Forams are cool because they’re such tiny objects,
yet they have so many complex features.
You can see something the size of a grain of rice
suddenly has a hundred chambers that
you didn’t even know were there.
I’m Shaun Mahmood.
I was part of a group of interns
working on the microfossil digitization
and rehousing project.
So, we had to come up with some way to scan something so tiny.
It’s quite difficult to mount these specimens
because if you poke it too hard with the brush
it will actually shatter.
So, now we have the specimen in the pipette tip
and we want to drop it in this little vial.
We label and bag the specimen. And we take this off to the CT lab
and they’ll scan it for us.
The way that a CT scanner works is it will create these 2D slices that we put together
and create a 3D object of that specimen.
We had this one specimen, you know, that on the outside looked like it was completely
eroded and we just didn’t think you would be able to see anything.
But we CT scanned it, and lo and behold,
the internal structure was absolutely beautiful.
We can extract the 3D model and make it available for researchers to observe, make measurements,
and everything that you would with a normal specimen.
We can print out a 3D object. Instead of it being a tenth of a millimeter, we can actually
have something that will fit in the palm of your hand.