Life was rough back in the Late Cretaceous, some 70 million years ago. The constant threat of predation, the relentless hunt for food, no convenience stores or acute care walk-in clinics. And for at least one particular hadrosaur, a variety of plant-eating, duck-billed dinosaur, things got particularly nasty when it developed septic arthritis in the elbow of one of its forelimbs.

But what was a lousy break for a long-dead dinosaur is a boon to science today: X-ray microtomography (XMT) sc