AP Photo

Sandra Raredon calls up onto her computer screen a digital X-ray of a longnose batfish. The creature, collected from the Gulf of Mexico, is a bizarre-looking thing. Its pointy nose and pectoral fins, which it used to crawl along the sandy sea floor, show up in detail in the X-ray. Curiously, so does its last meal. Raredon zooms in on the fish’s gut. “It actually ate a whole bunch of mollusks before it died,” she says. “You can even tell the genus of some of the shells.”