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.
"I am" is obviously about me and is speaking for myself. "You are a fine example of integrity(not)" is obviously about you and is speaking for myself. That still leaves you out of your mind.
The original term was irreducible simplicity.
So you contend.
I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable."
You know, it would be intersting if a CRIDer or two would at least *try* to get published in a legitimate scientific journal, be rejected, and then publicize the reasons for the rejection.
It might embarrass the scientific community into publishing.
You'd think at least one would try...
...that is, if they had any research to publish.
Go up to Hudson's Bay and dig in the same strata Tiktaalik Roseae was found in. If you find a fossil of a mammal in those rocks, give me a call and I'll help you write it up and get it published.
More likely the creationists would end up embarrassed because their faulty reasoning and research methods (if you want to call them that) would be exposed for everyone to see. It's no wonder they shun peer review.
As an aspiring physicist, I think I'd be most entertained by the written rejections of creationist treatises of thermodynamics and radioactive decay rates, but that's just my own personal bias. I'm sure the entertainment potential is much greater for biologists and geologists.
You lost me here. I can see you are slamming the Bible, denying the fact that its ultimate author is God Himself. Who is the genocidal psychopath that you refer to?
Take your pick. Anyone claiming that God has ordered the killing of women and children.
Indeed. I was attempting to call their bluff.
Next time someone posts a link to, say, Woodmorappe, I think I'll ask if it was peer-reviewed (granted, he has few peers!).
If not, why not? Didn't he even *try* to get some feedback from the pros?
If it was reviewed and rejected I'd like to know the details.
Another thing I like to point out is that if Behe had sought a review (not even the formal process that journals use, just a "Hey Jack, does this chapter seem OK to you?" to an academic colleague), he would have avoided considerable embarrassment and loss of face.
Nope you are being delusional again. "I am" is a self referential statement. It was in answer to your demand that I speak "FOR" myself. I was speaking for myself and about you. So, I was speaking for myself but the integrity statement was about you.
The contradiction you speak of is as ephemeral as your other delusions.
It's true. Irreducible simplicity is an engineering term.
So, you continue to contend.
I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable."
Absolutely, "I am", as I stated, is self-referential, but that is not the statement which refers to you and integrity, namely, "You fine example of integrity (not)".
Yes, I asked you to speak for yourself in regard to your statement, "You fine example of integrity (not)". *Speak for yourself* would make no sense in any other context.
Yes, you did. And my answer told you I was speaking "FOR" myself, however, that is not speaking "OF" myself. The only admission was that my statement was not at the behest or instead of someone else. It was of you. You can attempt to change the English language, but you won't succeed since you are not a fine example of integrity.
What were you *speaking for yourself* about?
Pretty simple, that you were not a fine example of integrity.
Of course you were talking about your lack of integrity, or else you would not have framed your response as an answer to MY post
A response tends to respond to something and in this case it was that my statement was my statement and no one else's. I might now amend the integrity statement to "You have almost no integrity". To help you out, the pronoun "you" refers to someone other than the person using the pronoun. Thus "You are an idiot" refers to you, however, that statement is made by me.
It's also true. I can help it if you're ignorant.
So you contend. (albeit incoherently)
I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable."
"I am" is pretty clear. It is self-referential and was an answer to "Speak for yourself". Any other meaning is one of your delusions.
The phrase, idiomatically speaking, means *of* yourself. Spin, spin, spin. You can do better than that
There exists a word for what you want to express. That word is "OF". You didn't use it, you used the word "FOR". You have been the one attempting to spin since the time I answered your demand to "Speak for myself. I do speak for myself even when stating about you, "You are a fine example of integrity(not)".
That makes no sense. Unless you were really writing in a different language? :)
I would expect it makes no sense to you, since you are deficient in English language skills.
So when you said *I am* to my *Speak for yourself*, you were talking about ME, even though, by your own admission, it was referential to YOU. I see. Is English your second language?
Ditto.
That's not what the phrase means in that context.
Well, the rest of the world cannot get into "that context"( not speaking "FOR" myself but this whole statement is speaking "OF" you) which happens to be your delusion.
Did you ever work as a spokesman for Slick Willy? :)
No, I would have taken your job and then you could not feed yourself.
It is true. Irreducible simplicity is an old engineering term that Behe stole and called IC.
So you continue to contend.
I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable."
I did not expect you to avow my statement. But I did expect you to argue quite a bit better than, "I'm rubber you're glue, everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you". That went out in the first grade.
*Speak for yourself* is a common idiomatic expression You don't get to rewrite it's definition and meaning because you made a silly mistake when using it. :)
Speak for yourself and of yourself. Remember, you originally made the statement "Speak for yourself" so I could not have made a silly mistake when using it.
Since I DO understand what the idiomatic expression *Speak for yourself* means, and you DON'T, your statement is hilarious!
Laugh it up, fuzzball, the primary use of "Speak for yourself" is ...
speak for yourself
And the fact that you did not accept my opinion(which I anticipated), does not change my statement that it was my opinion.
I could never work for him, as I lack your ability to lie with a straight face.
Well despite that lie, you'll lie using any face you have.
Because it's true. Irreducible simplicity is an old engineering term that Behe stole and called IC
You continue to contend.
I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable."
Well you were right the first time, since I did not make an error. I made no such admission. Your delusions are manifold.
But... you did anyway.
Simply one more of your delusions. Yet you do tacitly admit I did not make the "Speak for yourself" statement. Now admitting some of your delusion.
There ya go.
Trying to ignore the primary definition of the statement won't work.
But without backing up your opinion, by refusing to do so, it makes your *opinion* as useful as... well, I'm sure you've heard the expression. :)
My particular opinion of you has been verified by your delusional postings.
I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable."
Nope. That only happens in your delusions.
I never said you did make it.
Liar
You don't get to rewrite it's definition and meaning because you made a silly mistake when using it. :)
You made/used/posted that statement. And don't try to tapdance around "make" and "using".
Nor is ignoring the just as common second definition, which YOU posted with the first one.
I'm not dishonest like you. I posted the complete definition, and nowhere does it state that disavowing a statement changes who it refers to.
I have never cared what you think, ever. Why do you think I would start now? :)
And why do you think I refuse to provide you any evidence for my first contention. You've just snookered yourself. Game, set, and match.
I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.