Histology
Bone histology is a method used by scientists working on modern and extinct animals alike, as well as in the medical field and a variety of applications. By creating thin sections of material, either of original bones or of the fossil that has replaced the bone (but with the bone's original structure), we are able to gain new insights into various aspects of organisms' biology that are often difficult to discern from observational or skeletal data alone. For example, it's often difficult to confidently determine how old an extinct animal was when it died just based on its skeleton, especially when there is no good modern relative / analogue and when these animals grew very large (think sauropods, for example). However, all vertebrates deposit annual (or sometimes seasonal) markers in their bones that represent metabolic slowdowns (often during the more inhospitable part of the year), and counting these (like tree rings) can at least give us an idea of relative age if not absolute age of the animal.
Studying the internal bone structure can tell us about plenty of other things. For example, histology has been used to test hypotheses of extinct animals' metabolisms (endothermic ["warm-blooded"] vs. ectothermic ["cold-blooded"]), rates of growth, feeding ecologies, and disease / injury healing. The process is inherently destructive, always a concern with limited resources in extinct or endangered taxa, but it can also give us a lot of information that we can otherwise only guess at from the external structures, and it allows us to more fully use collections specimens that are not good enough for public display. |
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