一图胜千言 Pictures worth a thousand words — art, nature and imaging

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All images are crucial to the understanding of the natural world. As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Today is very exciting, because we've got the chance to do something that we've never done before here at the Museum. We are going to scan the fetus of a harbor porpoise.

She's instantly on vocal cord attached. . . . . . An adult female harbour porpoise was found on a beach in Sunderland, and inside this female, we discovered a fetus.

So that meant that we had a whole specimen that could be CT scanned for 3d imaging. These images will be of interest to scientists all over the world who study this species.

The use of images and science is nothing new. It was those early expeditions in the late 18th century when images really started to be used in the pursuit of science.

They took artists to record what they saw, and in a way, the images they created were the photographs of the day. The things of fantastic beauty and we all think of them as being works of art.

But actually what they are is pieces of evidence that were brought back from far-flung lands that showed people back in Europe that such a thing did exist. Here at the Museum, we have over 350,000 artworks spanning the last four centuries, and covering all the subject areas of Natural History.

When you look at an illustration by somebody like of the Church who was a botanist and the scientists in his own right. They were quite innovative.

He dissected flowers like an x-ray section that you'd get today, but these illustrations he carried out over a hundred years ago. With new scanning techniques, you can look at a fossil of a flower or a mineral or some sort of something that you don't want to cut it open necessarily.

But with these new techniques, you can cut it open virtually. Wow, that's amazing.

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