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To: Fantasywriter

Oy vey, I probably shouldn’t but perhaps another recap would help. As you point out in 119, you state:

“It took a veterinarian to recognize blood cells, because he wasn’t blinded by evolutionary assumptions.”

I responded by pointing out that Mary had trouble with the slides and so wasn’t seeing much of anything (probably due to how miniscule the remains were) - and so went to a histologist for help. Or, to directly quote:
“[Shweitzer] was having trouble preparing the slides, and went to a vet histologist who specializes in preparing slides made from bone for help, and she then showed the slides to a pathologist who believed them to be blood cells. I don’t think it would be obvious to a nonspecialist.”

To which you responded, confusingly:

“Wrong. It was a veterinarian who first identified the blood cells.”

Well, it was a veterinary conference. Gayle, the histologist and the unnamed pathologist are both veterinarians. “Wrong”? Wrong about what? I wasn’t sure what you meant, but thought maybe you were stating that it was the veterinarian Gayle who first noticed the red blood cells instead of the pathologist (although, that person, too, is a veterinarian). You then, for some reason, cite the Smithsonian article (perhaps you think the Smithsonian article contradicts the Earth Magazine article because they give some different details? They don’t contradict though.) And then you state:

“But I do appreciate how your version eliminates the veterinarian altogether.”

Again, the veterinarian was a pathologist. At this point I’m thinking that maybe you didn’t realize that the pathologist I referred to was also a veterinarian, and so you thought I had the wrong person. (I still think that that’s where you’re confused, but I’m not sure, since, as usual, you wouldn’t answer the question.) And so to try to clear things up I respond:

“Ah, by vet I thought you were specifically referring to Gayle. But yes, the pathologist is a vet as well.”

I thought that would clear everything up and we’d be able to move on. I stated that I misunderstood (due to your error, although I didn’t say that), and then tried to subtly (and nicely, without directly stating you were in error) fix where I thought the confusion was (by stating that the pathologist is a vet).

At least, I HOPED we’d move on since the question of “which vet first noticed the red blood cells” is easily the least interesting and least relevant part of the whole discussion. Yet, you decided to have a tantrum and make that the ONLY topic of discussion for all of the following rambling, incoherent, ad hominem posts.


139 posted on 05/02/2013 11:03:04 PM PDT by goodusername
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To: goodusername

In 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.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html#ixzz2SDeZaOW8


140 posted on 05/03/2013 2:13:43 AM PDT by Fantasywriter
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