When Mr. Hammer saw a huge lump of stone beneath the well-preserved ribs, he said he suspected that the chest cavity might still hold some internal organs. The first C.T. scan by Dr. Kuzmitz seemed to show a heart inside the stony shell, but the two-dimensional images left room for doubt. Then imaging specialists at North Carolina State's College of Veterinary Medicine used new software to produce three-dimensional pictures.
''Once the computer software put all the 2-D images together into a 3-D model, it became very apparent that, yeah, this was the real thing,'' said Mr. Fisher, director of the imaging resource facility. ''You could see both ventricles and the aorta.''