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Last week, scientists announced the discovery of a remarkably¹ well-preserved skeleton of what might be a new species of an ancient hominid that lived almost 2 million years ago.

The bones were found in 2008. This February, they were analyzed² by one of the highest-tech tools available, the synchrotron at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France. The device uses beams of x-rays a trillion times brighter than medical x-rays, and produces images at the atomic level.

Paleontologist Paul Tafforeau developed a technique to use the synchrotron to study fossils even still partially³ entombed—with resolution at the micron scale.

Fossils of the age and significance of the new find are rarely moved. But discoverer Lee Berger oversaw⁴ the careful transport of the skull⁵ and skeleton fragments from South Africa to France for a two-week intensive study.

The preliminary analysis has turned up fossilized insect eggs, left by ancient bugs⁶ that may have fed on the decomposing⁷ corpse⁸. There’s also a region of low-density that could be a section of the hominid’s brain. The researchers hope that the synchrotron ultimately supplies what used to be impossible-to-get details about our distant relative.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's Sixty-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.