Timothy rowe walks into his windowless, basement X-ray lab and plonks a fist-sized hunk of bronze on the table. He looks at me, smiling, waiting for me to tell him what it is. The amorphous blob looks like some sort of mangled body part, with vestiges of chambers, squashed and asymmetrical. But what? The ensuing silence is filled with a menacing buzz from Rowe's state-of-the-art CT scanner. After what seems like an age, he finally cracks and gives me a clue. "The question," he says, "is did it sing like a bird or roar like a dinosaur?" Bingo! This misshapen lump must be the metal cast of an archaeopteryx head. And that persistently buzzing scanner holds the key to its secrets. Rowe and his colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin have pioneered the use of high-powered computed tomography scans to image the brains of fossilised animals. Between their two machines they have up to five times the power of an average medical scanner, and the resolution to pick out details on the 5-micrometre scale. This technology has allowed them to probe the senses of some infamous dinosaurs, to get new insights into intimate details of their lives such as their hearing, sense of smell and balance. Last year, they used their scanner to address the delicate question of whether archaeopteryx, the original missing link between modern birds and their extinct ancestors, had dinosaur minds or bird brains.
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