Posted on 05/01/2006 8:29:14 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Dinosaur Shocker
By Helen Fields
Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.”
After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen.
It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors. “The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded—or both.
Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
It may be that Schweitzer’s unorthodox approach to paleontology can be traced to her roundabout career path. Growing up in Helena, Montana, she went through a phase when, like many kids, she was fascinated by dinosaurs. In fact, at age 5 she announced she was going to be a paleontologist. But first she got a college degree in communicative disorders, married, had three children and briefly taught remedial biology to high schoolers. In 1989, a dozen years after she graduated from college, she sat in on a class at Montana State University taught by paleontologist Jack Horner, of the Museum of the Rockies, now an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. The lectures reignited her passion for dinosaurs. Soon after, she talked her way into a volunteer position in Horner’s lab and began to pursue a doctorate in paleontology.
She initially thought she would study how the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones differs depending on how much the animal weighs. But then came the incident with the red spots.
AdvertisementIn 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”
Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”
What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says. If particles of that one dinosaur were able to hang around for 65 million years, maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.
Schweitzer tends to be self-deprecating, claiming to be hopeless at computers, lab work and talking to strangers. But colleagues admire her, saying she’s determined and hard-working and has mastered a number of complex laboratory techniques that are beyond the skills of most paleontologists. And asking unusual questions took a lot of nerve. “If you point her in a direction and say, don’t go that way, she’s the kind of person who’ll say, Why?—and she goes and tests it herself,” says Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University. Schweitzer takes risks, says Karen Chin, a University of Colorado paleontologist. “It could be a big payoff or it could just be kind of a ho-hum research project.”
In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from the Museum of the Rockies, was eating his lunch in a remote Montana canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. That bone turned out to be part of what may be the best preserved T. rex in the world. Over the next three summers, workers chipped away at the dinosaur, gradually removing it from the cliff face. They called it B. rex in Harmon’s honor and nicknamed it Bob. In 2001, they encased a section of the dinosaur and the surrounding dirt in plaster to protect it. The package weighed more than 2,000 pounds, which turned out to be just above their helicopter’s capacity, so they split it in half. One of B. rex’s leg bones was broken into two big pieces and several fragments—just what Schweitzer needed for her micro-scale explorations.
It turned out Bob had been misnamed. “It’s a girl and she’s pregnant,” Schweitzer recalls telling her lab technician when she looked at the fragments. On the hollow inside surface of the femur, Schweitzer had found scraps of bone that gave a surprising amount of information about the dinosaur that made them. Bones may seem as steady as stone, but they’re actually constantly in flux. Pregnant women use calcium from their bones to build the skeleton of a developing fetus. Before female birds start to lay eggs, they form a calcium-rich structure called medullary bone on the inside of their leg and other bones; they draw on it during the breeding season to make eggshells. Schweitzer had studied birds, so she knew about medullary bone, and that’s what she figured she was seeing in that T. rex specimen.
Most paleontologists now agree that birds are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. In fact, they say that birds are dinosaurs—colorful, incredibly diverse, cute little feathered dinosaurs. The theropod of the Jurassic forests lives on in the goldfinch visiting the backyard feeder, the toucans of the tropics and the ostriches loping across the African savanna.
To understand her dinosaur bone, Schweitzer turned to two of the most primitive living birds: ostriches and emus. In the summer of 2004, she asked several ostrich breeders for female bones. A farmer called, months later. “Y’all still need that lady ostrich?” The dead bird had been in the farmer’s backhoe bucket for several days in the North Carolina heat. Schweitzer and two colleagues collected a leg from the fragrant carcass and drove it back to Raleigh.
AdvertisementAs far as anyone can tell, Schweitzer was right: Bob the dinosaur really did have a store of medullary bone when she died. A paper published in Science last June presents microscope pictures of medullary bone from ostrich and emu side by side with dinosaur bone, showing near-identical features.
In the course of testing a B. rex bone fragment further, Schweitzer asked her lab technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, to put it in weak acid, which slowly dissolves bone, including fossilized bone—but not soft tissues. One Friday night in January 2004, Wittmeyer was in the lab as usual. She took out a fossil chip that had been in the acid for three days and put it under the microscope to take a picture. “[The chip] was curved so much, I couldn’t get it in focus,” Wittmeyer recalls. She used forceps to flatten it. “My forceps kind of sunk into it, made a little indentation and it curled back up. I was like, stop it!” Finally, through her irritation, she realized what she had: a fragment of dinosaur soft tissue left behind when the mineral bone around it had dissolved. Suddenly Schweitzer and Wittmeyer were dealing with something no one else had ever seen. For a couple of weeks, Wittmeyer said, it was like Christmas every day.
In the lab, Wittmeyer now takes out a dish with six compartments, each holding a little brown dab of tissue in clear liquid, and puts it under the microscope lens. Inside each specimen is a fine network of almost-clear branching vessels—the tissue of a female Tyrannosaurus rex that strode through the forests 68 million years ago, preparing to lay eggs. Close up, the blood vessels from that T. rex and her ostrich cousins look remarkably alike. Inside the dinosaur vessels are things Schweitzer diplomatically calls “round microstructures” in the journal article, out of an abundance of scientific caution, but they are red and round, and she and other scientists suspect that they are red blood cells.
Of course, what everyone wants to know is whether DNA might be lurking in that tissue. Wittmeyer, from much experience with the press since the discovery, calls this “the awful question”—whether Schweitzer’s work is paving the road to a real-life version of science fiction’s Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs were regenerated from DNA preserved in amber. But DNA, which carries the genetic script for an animal, is a very fragile molecule. It’s also ridiculously hard to study because it is so easily contaminated with modern biological material, such as microbes or skin cells, while buried or after being dug up. Instead, Schweitzer has been testing her dinosaur tissue samples for proteins, which are a bit hardier and more readily distinguished from contaminants. Specifically, she’s been looking for collagen, elastin and hemoglobin. Collagen makes up much of the bone scaffolding, elastin is wrapped around blood vessels and hemoglobin carries oxygen inside red blood cells.
Because the chemical makeup of proteins changes through evolution, scientists can study protein sequences to learn more about how dinosaurs evolved. And because proteins do all the work in the body, studying them could someday help scientists understand dinosaur physiology—how their muscles and blood vessels worked, for example.
Proteins are much too tiny to pick out with a microscope. To look for them, Schweitzer uses antibodies, immune system molecules that recognize and bind to specific sections of proteins. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have been using antibodies to chicken collagen, cow elastin and ostrich hemoglobin to search for similar molecules in the dinosaur tissue. At an October 2005 paleontology conference, Schweitzer presented preliminary evidence that she has detected real dinosaur proteins in her specimens.
Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”
young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”
This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”
By definition, there is a lot that scientists don’t know, because the whole point of science is to explore the unknown. By being clear that scientists haven’t explained everything, Schweitzer leaves room for other explanations. “I think that we’re always wise to leave certain doors open,” she says.
But schweitzer’s interest in the long-term preservation of molecules and cells does have an otherworldly dimension: she’s collaborating with NASA scientists on the search for evidence of possible past life on Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan, and other heavenly bodies. (Scientists announced this spring, for instance, that Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus appears to have liquid water, a probable precondition for life.)
Astrobiology is one of the wackier branches of biology, dealing in life that might or might not exist and might or might not take any recognizable form. “For almost everybody who works on NASA stuff, they are just in hog heaven, working on astrobiology questions,” Schweitzer says. Her NASA research involves using antibodies to probe for signs of life in unexpected places. “For me, it’s the means to an end. I really want to know about my dinosaurs.”
AdvertisementTo that purpose, Schweitzer, with Wittmeyer, spends hours in front of microscopes in dark rooms. To a fourth-generation Montanan, even the relatively laid-back Raleigh area is a big city. She reminisces wistfully about scouting for field sites on horseback in Montana. “Paleontology by microscope is not that fun,” she says. “I’d much rather be out tromping around.”
“My eyeballs are just absolutely fried,” Schweitzer says after hours of gazing through the microscope’s eyepieces at glowing vessels and blobs. You could call it the price she pays for not being typical.
There is a difference between God's activity in our time today and God's activity during the time of Joshua (circa 1400 B.C.)
God spoke directly with Moses and Joshua 3300 plus years ago. God is not speaking directly in today's time with George W. Bush or Osama bin Laden. Regarding Joshua's time, God wanted evil civilizations exterminated and He commissioned Joshua to do that very thing. God is God - He reserves the right to kill, and to make alive. He Himself is the originator and enforcer of the absolute moral truths, such as, the murder of innocent babies being wrong. When there are times where absolute moral truths come in conflict with one another, God obviously exercises His will in establishing a hierarchical structure wherein He places larger purposes over others, thus resulting in suspension or override of one moral value vs another. That is not for you and I to judge, however. God's ways are just, His judgements are always righteous in nature. Neither you, nor I, can possibly fathom His mysterious ways. But that does not mean that we -- mankind -- are thereby free to pick and choose which of His moral laws we will obey, and when. He does what He pleases; and yes, God IS good; but He is not safe. Goodness is never safe for a race of sinners like you and me.
Quark...if the article I posted from AiG does not, in your view, clearly illustrate the point - that editors of science journals have a bias against creation scientists because of the religious conclusions which follow from their work...the integrity of the work itself being unassailable, but the problem being that the editors simply don't like the conclusions that follow, since they point to special creation, which the editors vehemently disagree with for personal reasons...then there is no use talking with you further on the subject. The bias against creation scientists is real, not because of the science, but because of the religious conclusions that flow from it. That's what the atheists, socialists, leftist, marxists, etc., can't stomach.
If we cannot tell by looking at God's actions that he is good and just, why should we believe it when he says he is good and just?
I think this is a really good idea. I'm afraid they probably don't get enough well-researched critiques of their material, at least if they do get them they don't publish them. Perhaps we could get a group together and have a person send one in every few weeks!
Still waiting for a response to my letter send in in March, though. :-(
Genesis is not an allegory or parable. It is literal truth, which is what makes it so sublime and supreme.
Are you serious? Like I said, please show one example from AiG of "unassailable" science that won't get accepted for mainstream publication. Everything I've seen on their site has been laughably error-ridden.
It only takes a very little bit of scientific literacy to understand why claims of "dinosaurs and people living together" and "evolution breaks the laws of thermodynamics" and "genes can't increase information" are completely silly. This isn't rocket science, here. You don't need a PhD to see why these things are ridiculous, you only need to seriously study a little science.
The reason creation science can't get published is because it is completely wrong, and it's very easy to show why in light of what we know today, and people who take the time to properly understand the material can obviously see this. Have you tried reading actual mainstream science books on the subject, or actually thoroughly reading through talkorigins.org, and looking up the actual references it cites?
Think about this - if creation science really is true, then the effort to suppress what would amount to the largest breakthrough in the history of science is not a case of simple bias, you're talking about a vast, elaborate conspiracy that spans the entire globe (one for which no evidence exists, conveniently).
The Bible is not science book; it is a spiritual text rich with allegory and imagery - to look at the events in Genesis 1 as a checklist of historical facts convolutes the world into something it is clearly not.
What actions of God would you call bad or unjust?
"A person who refuses to love the truth (note the verses which precede the one you quoted) has already made the decision to reject God in favor of his own agenda. God is confirming that person in his love of wickedness."
.... by sending down *strong delusions* on them, thereby negating their free will, and making it that much harder if not impossible for the person to change their ways. What a sick, sadistic God.
"God did not create man with a sin nature; man's nature became sinful when he chose, of his own free will, to disobey God."
That's sophistry. If God created us, then he created our natures as well. He would also have known, at the time he created us, that we would not be able to withstand temptation and would sin. That he would punish us anyway, even though the fault is his own for making a crappy design, is sick.
"Right there is your free will, fully operative in man."
How does one sin when one doesn't know the difference between good and evil, right and wrong?
He wrote some pretty unjust laws. Then there's always the situation with Joshua and genocide.
The question itself presupposes some sort of universal, objective moral rule. How can such a standard be justified from a non-theistic point of view?
Cordially,
Would you like to be murdered and your property stolen? How about seeing your children murdered?
How about your grandchildren?
Given enough time, you will be an ancestor to many people, some of which will also be descended from your curent enemies.
That would be an attempt at objective morality, but that is not my personal motive. I simply get no pleasure and much pain from hurting other people or seeing them hurt. I am one of those people who tell the cashier when they miss ringing up an item.
Why should my sentiments or tastes be the source or foundation of moral norms? What reason is there that my taste regarding virtue and vice be the ground of moral incumbency at large?
Cordially,
All morality is ultimately tied to the pleasure, pain, health or well being of living entities. Morality is irrelevant to entities not capable of being harmed or benefited. Any morality that is universal must be universal. It it is wrong to harm you, then it is wrong to harm me, and vice-versa. Any other construct is just power, not morality.
There are a few difficulties here. First, (leaving aside for the moment the moral confusion of those who think animals have rights) animals are living entities that are not ordinarily thought of as moral beings. Yet, if human beings are nothing but sophisticated, "advanced" animals, why are human beings considered moral beings? Second, how is morality and its attendant obligation accounted for by what must be, according to the argument, mere subjective emotive preference or sentiment of "harm" or "benefit"? Not only are harm and benefit in the eye of the beholder, but how can harm and benefit possibly be accounted for without positing some prior moral rule that one should not commit harm? Why is there some prior moral obligation to "benefit" others or myself in the first place? Where does that prior moral rule come from? How can an "ought" be derived merely from what is?
Cordially,
You are asking for a complete discourse on morality -- something I don't have the ability to deliver. All of us live with a limited ability to discern what is right and wrong in complex situations.
Obviously we cannot see the future in detail, nor can we always know what is best for ourselves and others. What morality requires is that we give it our best shot.
I really don't care about morality in the abstract. Morality always involves a transaction between beings capable of being harmed or benefitted. When questions come up about what is right and wrong, it is because the consequences are unclear.
I you do not experience empathy and reequire some external authority or pretext for moral behavior, I cannot help you. I suppose that is why we need laws, to govern those that do not govern themselves.
You have no problem treating the explicit laws in Exodus, which are stated in the text to be God's commands to Israel through Moses, as products of that day's culture and society, not as eternal verities. But you insist that the first chapter of Genesis is "literal truth," even though it contradicts the record God left for us to observe through our senses in the earth and in the skies.
To my perspective, that is exactly backwards, probably because I am a Jew. Jews call these books the torah, which means "the rules." In Judaism, following the rules in the Torah is important; the stories in the Torah are of secondary importance-- historically, some Jews have taken them literally, some allegorically, but no one thought that issue to be a very important one.
The historical narrative is very important, for it lays the foundation for the entire message of the Bible. As a Jew I know you do not accept the New Testament...however, the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old Testament is revealed in the New.
Jesus regarded Adam as a real, historical person. the book of Romans, especially chapter 5, focuses much on Adam, especially verse 12. Adam sinned, and through his sin, we all became sinners. Death comes to us all because of sin. I would say that is of supreme importance to everybody.
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