STUNNING PICS FROM INSIDE SNAKE'S DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
3.jpg'It's a sit and wait predator,' explained Mr Lauridsen. 'It fasts for months and then eats a really large meal.
'It can eat the equivalent of up to 50 per cent of its own bodyweight, and in order to get the energy out of the meal, it has to restart the intestinal system very fast.'
The approach has several advantages over the 'subjective and sometimes misleading' interpretations of dissections, according to the researchers.
Dissection induces changes, explained Dr Hansen. 'For example, after opening the dense bone of a turtle shell, the lungs will collapse due to the change in pressure.
'And to use these techniques you don't have to kill the animal,' he added. 'We can do this using live animals and revisit the results over and over again.'
The images, they say, will be valuable tools in future studies of animal anatomy for bothresearch and education.
As part of the EU project called Locomorph, they have produced similarly spectacular images of several other species, including frogs, alligators, turtles, swamp eels and bearded dragons.
