Quote Originally Posted by Lord Raziere View Post
Depends on how dangerous the thing is, but leaning unrealistic.

generally, if a scientist wants to study a living thing, its best they keep them alive and just ask about their experiences and observe them while they are functioning rather while they are non-functioning. sure you can learn things by dissecting a corpse, but say you encountered an elf you wanted to learn about, there is no way your getting any good information about their culture, psychology, social cues, beliefs or anything like that if they are dead on the operating table. the brain is one of the best sources of information you can draw from and the only interface for that is good old fashioned talking, and not even being threatening as generally you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

however if the life form is dangerous and shows aggression enough to the point where it threatens peoples livelihoods without being able to be talked down, thats where harsher methods would probably come in. but even this might not mean immediate death, there are still things you can learn from capturing a lifeform alive and interrogating them, even if they are hostile. no different from a criminal or wartime situation: a living enemy soldier can be still be useful for learning about the enemy.

if however capturing proves too dangerous or if fighting it renders it dead in the process of capturing it, then you could start cutting it open and rooting around its inside to learn this and that. but its kind of last resort, and at a certain point you can only learn so much from corpses: it would generally be safe to assume that any members of the species you cut open would have basically have the same biology and while there is always genetic differences, they would follow the same basic body plan and thus once you meet one corpse you've probably met all of them. sure scientific rigor, repeat experiments to see if its consistent and so on and so forth, but generally you can tell that they all work the same way once you got the pattern down.
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.