As part of an animal’s routine check up, the veterinarians at the Oregon Zoo send each “patient” through an x-ray machine. The zoo also recently tweeted out a compilation of their spookiest x-ray pictures as an early Halloween celebration. We talked to a veterinarian at the zoo, Richard Sim, about some of the wild anatomy in each image.

Meller’s Chameleon

“They have a lot of strength in their hands,” says Sim. “Often when gripping a branch, they’ll have two toes on one side and two toes on the other,” as you can see in this image. Chameleons extend their tails for balance, so the fact that this little guy has his curled up into a perfect spiral means he must be pretty relaxed.

Rodrigues Flying Fox

Taking a look at this bat skeleton you can see the lightweight bones and backwards knees that allow these little mammals to fly. But what’s really crazy are the thin, curved bones at the top of the x-ray. Those are the bat’s fingers. Sim says bats evolved really long fingers to support their wing skin.

Ball Python

A snake’s spinal cord runs from the back of the head to the tip of its tail. Snakes are also the only creatures that have ribs running down the entire length of their bodies, says Sim. In this image you can see the rib bones as the thin lines curving away from the spinal column on each side.

American Beaver

The large bones at the base, where the tail connects with the rest of this beaver’s body, which Sim says allow for “excellent muscle attachment,” allowing the beaver to make powerful motions with its tail. Beavers typically use their tails to communicate—they slap the surface of the water to warn others of coming danger—or to change direction when swimming.

Toco Toucan

A bird’s beak is not one large, bony mass, says Sim. If it were, hornbills and toucans would never be able to get off the ground. Instead, the outside of the beak is a shell of keratin, the same material that makes up human fingernails, and the inside is filled with light, spongy tissue and a boney core. What looks like short veins or cracks in this toucan’s beak are actually pieces of keratin scaffolding holding the beak together.

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R Aquarii

Two stars are locked in a fight to the death a mere 650 light-years from Earth. A new camera system on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope zoomed in on the action.

You’re looking at a binary star system, named R Aquarii, that consists of a red giant star and a white dwarf orbiting around a common center of mass. Binary star systems are actually really common in the universe—more than four-fifths of the stars in our sky are actually a cluster of stars orbiting together. R Aquarii is one of the closest such systems to Earth.

Many binary systems consist of two stars peacefully dancing together. Not so with R Aquarii. These two stars are both nearing the end of their lives and are slowly but surely destroying themselves and each other. The red giant is what’s called a Mira variable star, an enormous class of star that pulsates as it expands Mira variable stars cast their outer layers out into space, sometimes reaching a brightness 1,000 times that of our sun as they grow.

View from the Hubble Telescope

The other star in this suicide pact is an old, compact white dwarf star that has long since consumed its nuclear fuel and is feeding off the red giant. As it does so, the material accumulating on the surface of the dwarf will trigger a thermonuclear reaction every so often. Clouds of debris from the regular explosions and expansions surround the system.

By interstellar standards, R Aquarii is basically our sun’s next door neighbor. As such, astronomers have paid a lot of attention to the system over the years, making it the perfect target to test a new camera subsystem. Scientists hooked up the device, called the Zurich IMaging POLarimeter, or ZIMPOL, to the VLT in the Atacama Desert in Chile to capture this unusually clear image, which is sharper than many photos taken in space. Eventually, ZIMPOL will search out new exoplanets with the near-infrared imaging technology on display in this image.

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