Jacquet, an assistant professor of geological sciences in the MU College of Arts and Science, believes this study offers a new way for scientists to investigate how different biological armored systems worked throughout the fossil record. ‘By using micro-CT, we can virtually separate the individual components of the armor,’ Jacquet said. ‘That allows us to see how it protected these worms until, unfortunately, they went extinct during one of the major extinction events in the fossil record. We are able to manipulate the virtual models to determine how the individual armor pieces moved relative to each other, as well as determine the degree of overlap between them.’