Learning from the Best

Over the years I have had the privilege of hearing from multiple speakers in my field, and frankly I feel like I've had the blessing of learning from some of the best. I'm currently in Dr. Schweitzer's taphonomy course at NCSU, and even with that I still enjoy hearing her lectures outside of class. So today, while taking a break from writing my final paper for her class, I hiked over to the science building to hear her speak about paleontology and how it is multidisciplinary.

One reason I like her is her sense of humor. "I am a vertebrate paleontologist," she said as she started. "If you don't have a back bone, you're not really alive!" Of course we know better, but we have to pick on the others.

Dr. Schweitzer has a bit of a soap box, as she rightfully wants paleontology to have more credit than it tends to get. Because of the reconstructions, it sometimes is considered a pseudoscience. Her work is focused on using the scientific method and proving that yes, we are scientists, and that everything can and should be tested. And it makes sense that she has this soap box; her work makes a lot of people mad because most people don't think that soft tissue can preserve because prior to her work it had never happened. Sketchy logic? Yes, very much so. But Dr. Schweitzer amazes me because she's not a proud woman; when people challenge her in science, rather than get angry and protective she challenges her own work and tests it, again, and again, and again.

I've heard the story from her of how she found soft tissue for the first time a million times, though today she went into more detail than I'm used to.

The story goes that a T. rex she was sent in 2005 was broken, and the bone on the inside was very, very vascular. It was medulary bone, a layer of calcium that birds form in their bones to prevent their own bones from cracking under their own weight when they're laying eggs. Reptiles have bone to draw from, like mammals, and don't lay down this tissue. Really cool, because even primitive birds lay down that layer. This showed that yes, birds and dinosaurs are closer related than dinosaurs and reptiles. Awesome.

Problem. People really didn't like the idea of soft tissue.

She went to dissolve the fossil to get a better look at it and.... oops. Soft tissue. It wasn't completely replaced by rock.

"Well... that wasn't supposed to happen. That was.... interesting."

But it did happen. 

And it LOOKED right...

But she wanted more evidence than that. See, morphology is not science. It gives you a starting point, but its also very objective. This is where she started the science.

Fun fact: not that we need it, but this also gave evidence that dinosaurs are not related to mammals. Mammals have no nuclei in their blood cells, and everything else does. T. rex was found to have a nucleus. Surprise, surprise. Still, fun fact of the day.

Some of the cells in the bone LOOKED like osteocytes. 

Now, bone has a lot of collagen, which has banding in morphology. And that measured up just fine. But again, time for some objective science.

At this point, she used immunology by demineralizing the bone, applied relevant antibodies, and hit them with light to look for bonding. And sure enough... though the signal wasn't extremely strong, it was there. And this was confirmed as she used other relevant antibodies.

In addition, she tested her T. rex and another dinosaur with SEM, monoclonal antibodies, and mass spectrometry.

Everyone asks. WHAT ABOUT DNA?!

Well, their wasn't enough to clone a dinosaur. There will be no Jurassic.... um... excuse me, Cretaceous Park... However, staining did show that there was binding with the components of DNA. Still pretty cool.

Another soap box for her, understandably so because of funding, is the question of who cares. And here is, as best as I understand it, her answer.

To understand the future, we have nothing to work with but the past, so looking back gives us data we don't otherwise have.

To understand our origins, climate change, disease, ecology, etc, we have to understand what has happened before. And how the world will respond. It gives a control for studies revolving around the question of whether humans are affecting our planet.

To understand animals on our planet, we need to understand that 99.9% of all species ever to exist are extinct.

And why dinosaurs?

Well for one thing, they're cool! They're an extreme, with some of them being the largest animals to walk the planet. We have no idea how they could have lived. On the other extreme, they're some of the smallest.

They are one of the longest existing groups of animals.

They evolved some weird traits only known in the fossil record.

They filled every niche that mammals do and more.

And more important than anything (and I completely agree with her on this, and this is actually one of my main arguments) it forms an interest in science.

In addition, understanding past molecules increases the genetic diversity that we can study, and using those molecules may give us a better idea for conservation and maybe even help us recover some of that diversity.

And so, so much more.

C'mon. You've gotta admit its amazing. 

And so is she.

"New data could come along tomorrow and prove me wrong. That's science."

"If you can make people curious, they can do anything.... you don't have to be very smart, you just have to learn to ask the right questions."