More or less this. Biology has come a long way from dissecting something being our first instinct to learning about it, and we've got a strong sense of how irreplaceable a specimen could be. In fact, these days we've got a bunch of technologies to allow us to inspect the interior of something without killing it, be it x-rays, or micro cameras.
That being said, it would likely be very uncomfortable for the specimen, because even with the best efforts to reduce the discomfort of this sort of thing, it still is uncomfortable. Oh, and they would eventually dissect whatever it was, but they would just wait until it died of natural causes to do so.