Jamaica Specimen courtesy of Dr. Lynton Land Project by Courtney Turich About this project Serial and thin sectioning are commonly used in the study of fossil and Recent reef ecology and sedimentology. Serial sectioning provides unique information to reef studies and is necessary for petrographical analysis of sediment, cement and organisms. However, serial sectioning also destroys valuable information.
Sediments wash out, pieces break off and centimeters of rock are pulverized in the cutting process.
In a CT scan, this information, important to the understanding of ecological and sedimentary processes, can be viewed easily and quantified in three dimensions. Digital images therefore preserve depositional relationships, saving information which can be invoked in concert with slab and thin section analysis. Despite these advantages, scanning of invertebrates has thus far been generally unsuccessful. The similarities in the effective density of the fossil, and it's encasing matrix, is not conducive to X-ray resolution of structures. For instance, a test scan of a rock from the Capitan Reef complex of West Texas yielded an image that shows only a gray grainy matrix.