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Photo: Baërbel Schmidt

Doing diagnostics on zoo animals isn’t easy. They can’t tell you where it hurts, and at least a few of them look at a vet and think “lunch.” But a new CT scanner at Berlin’s Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research is making the process a little easier. Vets at the institute, which sees patients from several zoos in the region, used to rely on handheld ultrasound units—good for details, bad on the big picture. Now they’ve acquired a $1.4 million Toshiba Aquilion CX CT scanner modded with a table used to support obese human patients (up to 661 pounds!). It’ll capture 4,000 images in 30 seconds and assemble the slices into a 3-D whole. “The new scanner transforms the body into a virtual object,” says the institute’s Thomas Hildebrandt. The patients seem to like it. It was able to see water in the lungs of an Amazonian fish called an Arapaima, for example—a neat trick, since the 7-foot-long air-breathing beast has four lungs, and one set obscures the next. In fact, the images are so good that Hildebrandt is hoping to exhibit them in a traveling virtual-reality theater. Considering that the only other way to see the inside of a tiger is to get swallowed by one, 3-D scans and a road show seem like a good alternative.