Royal Veterinary College London student Jen Oraze with a sea turtle her team is putting through a CT scanner – credit RVC press.

When a massive loggerhead sea turtle was hit by a boat and admitted to a Florida veterinary hospital, the doctors didn’t know what to do.

They needed to ascertain the extent of her injuries, but the CT scanner at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach was too small.

‘Pennywise’ as they named her, was then lifted by the team onto a truck and taken to nearby Jupiter Medical Center to use the CT scanner for humans. But imagine their surprise when they arrived and found that it also was too small for the giant old female.

They needed to think: which animal in society is both larger than a human and commands enough veterinary attention to justify the financing of a super-sized CT scanner?

The team from Loggerhead Center next found themselves at Palm Beach Equine Clinic in Wellington, where they presumably asked a humored bunch of horse veterinaries if they could use their horse-sized CT scanner.

#A 302-pound loggerhead sea turtle injured by a boat required a horse-sized #CtScan, which revealed she is carrying eggs. Boaters are urged to slow down during nesting season to protect endangered turtles. https://t.co/DJOO5LRIS4

— Phys.org (@physorg_com) May 25, 2025

“And, luckily, the horse-sized machine was big enough to fit this lady through,” Heather Barron, the chief science officer and veterinarian at Loggerhead, told the Associated Press.

AP wasn’t informed over the extent of Pennywise’s wounds, but the CT scan did reveal that the ‘lady’ was carrying a clutch of eggs.

“We hope we’ll be able to get her back out there into the wild as soon as possible so that she can lay those eggs,” said Barron.

CT scans for turtles suffering from ship strikes are a recent veterinary innovation. The Royal Veterinary College (RVC) London helped pioneer the process under the direction of a Floridian student who was interested in using CT scans for diagnoses.

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In 2016, marine biology graduate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Jen Oraze, led a study team at the RVC to perform CT scans on 5 turtles with suspected spinal cord injuries.

Dozens of sea turtles are taken in by a Florida rescue centre every year after collisions with boats in the Florida Keys. A few suffer chronic spinal injuries and lose their ability to dive without the aid of special weights.

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Hearing that a consultant vet at a marine life center from England’s southern coast was running a Florida sea turtle named Ali through a CT scanner, Oraze was fascinated. She then led a study to examine sea turtles from various other aquariums in England and Belgium, including on one that was 70-years-old.

She was eager to publish her findings in hopes that CT scanning of turtles could become standard in her home state of Florida as well as well.

SHARE This Larger-Than-Life Story Of A Turtle’s Journey To The Hospital…