Roadkill. Highway pancakes. Flat pizza. Most of the time, it’s either smashed to a pulp, pushed to the side of the road, or collected and destroyed. But dead animals have a lot of value, from scientific to caloric.

Roadkill is in the news this week, after Polish biologist Piotr Skorka published research on butterflies Monday—roadkill butterflies, to be specific. His team collected a variety of the insects, froze them, and put them on roads and verges (edges of roads). Later they went back to count how many remained.

They found that larger butterflies and those actually on the road surface were more likely to get eaten by scavengers, perhaps because they were more visible.

But the study, published in Biological Conservation, wasn’t the first time that the dead bodies of roadkilled animals have helped science. They are useful for collecting DNA samples, for measuring toxic buildup in animals, and for studying anatomy, just to name a few examples.