Medical CT data of unopened transport containers from the German Tendaguru Expedition 1909-1913

In this dataset, 40 bamboo corset and 6 wooden crates from the German Tendaguru Expedition, originally packed and unopened, are presented by their computed tomographic data. The German Tendaguru Expedition (GTE) was led by members of the Museum fuer Naturkunde with the aim to exploit a rich Late Jurassic (ca. 150 MA) fossil deposit in Southern Tanzania, then the German colony Deutsch Ostafrika. The Tendaguru locality yielded one of the most important dinosaur faunas of the Late Jurassic so far. It was very well documented and, because of its colonial background and the intense contribution of about 500 Tanzanian workers, receives high interest not only from the paleontological side, but also for historical studies. However, whereas most of the material has been prepared and properly curated and described, there is still a number of unopened transport containers in the fossil vertebrate collection of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, which were now studied virtually via their computed tomographic scans. The computed tomography was achieved both at the Institute for Zoo- and Wildlife Research (IZW) Berlin, and the Charité. The dataset contains the original DICOM data from these scans for download and study, and a movie of each transport container with the digitally prepared specimens. Most of the bamboo corsets and boxes contained vertebrae, girdle and limb bones of the small ornithopod dinosaur Dysalotosaurus lettowvorbecki, but there were also rare finds of the thyreophoran dinosaur Kentrosaurus aethiopicus and different sauropod dinosaurs. The results of the CT scans and the documentation of the content of the unopened containers from Tendaguru are used to supplement the inventory of material from this locality, to define priorities for future preparation, but also to document field practices under colonial condition and therefore serve as an archive also for historical studies.