DICKINSON, N.D. (KXNET) — Museums are commonly known as places that preserve the past for the present and future generations. Now, the Badlands Dinosaur Museum is finding a new way to do so.

The halls of CHI St. Alexius Health in Dickinson are getting to see a different sort of patient. This one is prehistoric.

“So today, we’re going to be CT scanning some of the new dinosaur skulls that we’ve found,” explained museum curator Dr. Denver Fowler.

These new fossils are extraordinary — even for dinosaurs.

“The Tyrannosaur we’re scanning is called a holotype, so it’s the first one named of its kind in the world, we named it a year and a bit ago, the Lambeosaurus we’re scanning today is the only one ever found in the U.S.,” said Fowler.

Although CT scanners are primarily used for humans, sending dinosaur bones through them is becoming a common practice. However, it’s nearly unheard of in North Dakota.

“I don’t think it’s ever been done in Dickinson before, and I don’t know how much it’s been done in North Dakota, so it’s amazing that the hospital has been so kind as to loan us the use of the machine,” Fowler explained.

Destiny Wolf has ties to both the museum and the hospital, and she played a hand in getting the hospital on board with the idea. Wolf says the scanning involved quite a bit of planning and logistics for both the hospital and the museum.

“In their original matrix or rock that surrounds them in nature, we plaster those up to make sure that they’re very stable for bringing back, however, once we actually prepare and clean up a fossil, it becomes really delicate, so that became a lot of the balancing act of how we can protect those fossils in transit, even just across town,” explained Wolf.

She says staying local with the fossils has been a huge benefit, as travel is usually limited by their size and fragility.

“Because we’re able to do this here in our community, we’re actually able to take much larger, more fragile fossils, to be able to throw them through our scanner here at the hospital,” Wolf said.

Dr. Fowler says these scans will broaden the information available for the people visiting the museum.

“You can see a nice, beautiful skull and you go, ‘It’s a very pretty looking skull,’ but if you can find out more interesting facts about it, you know, you can surround the specimen in the exhibit with all that cool information,” said Fowler.

He says the kids visiting the museum will benefit from this especially.

“They’re already excited about dinosaurs but the plan is to show them something that they didn’t know about, show them something new every time, and encourage them to be thinking about how we find out new knowledge, how science actually takes place,” Fowler added.

And the museum says it’s not done yet.

“Every year, we have more and more specimens coming out of our quarries in Montana, and you never know when you’ll come across something really scientifically significant that you need scanned, so we are definitely going to collaborate in the future again,” Wolf explained.

Museum spokespeople say they’re hoping to 3D print models of the skulls that were sent through the CT scanner. By doing so, they may be able to replicate the sounds that the dinosaurs made.