Early one morning in Washington, D.C., Bruno Frohlich awaits a delivery at his office on the sixth floor of the National Museum of Natural History. "The apes," he says, "will be here in 30 minutes. I hope your nose is not so sensitive."

Those apes—dozens of long-dead chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas conserved in the museum's vast collection of primates—are being scanned because the museum plans to put the CT studies online, where they will be available to all researchers.

One by one, the primates will be removed from the decades-old brine preserving them, placed on the bed of a top-of-the-line CT scanner, and slid into the six-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) doughnut-shaped device, where they will undergo 3-D medical imaging to a half-millimeter scale