An Unbelievable Discovery -- Seeing Differently

 AN UNBELIEVABLE DISCOVERY AND AN OPENED DOOR—MARY SCHWEITZER 

Mary had hardly slept for weeks. She was sure that no one would believe her. Maybe there was some mistake. She had checked and rechecked — but she found the same results. Mary had seen things that no one had ever seen before. She had seen the calcium deposits inside the fossil bone—the deposits normally stored within bird bones to provide calcium for the eggshells to be produced by a pregnant female. 

But then she also saw the tiny flexible blood vessels and remnant red blood cells. All of this would not have been surprising for any biologist or ornithologist observing a modern bird. But this was not just any bird. This was the fossilized femur of a pregnant Tyrannosaurus rex — a bone that was 68 million years old — a bone that had once belonged to a kind of bird that had originally weighed tons.

Fossil bones are precious. No one had ever cut one in half. No one had ever thought that there would be anything of interest inside. No one would have guessed that tiny blood vessels, red blood cell remnants, and intact protein fragments might be there. This was impossible. There was no way for such things to be preserved for so long. It was clearly not possible. Everybody knew it. Yet, there it was.

Mary Higby Schweitzer, a former student of Jack Horner, had trained as a biologist before she studied paleontology. Most people in the field had studied geology—the rocks within which the bones were buried. Few had studied the biology of the living animals buried inside the rocks. Accordingly, Mary could easily recognize the calcium deposits inside the bone, in the medullary cavity.

Of course, it was partly a fortunate accident. In this case, the fossil bone had been found in a very remote part of the badlands of Montana. There was no road. The grad students had to walk in and work hard to remove the rock above the fossil. Once uncovered, the bone had to be encased in plaster to protect it during transportation. 

But the whole mass was too heavy for the loaned helicopter to lift it. So it had to be cut in half. The cut was clean. Often fossil bones are painted with chemicals and clear coats to protect them from further decay. But these would introduce modern substances that would contaminate the fossil, especially at the molecular level. Mary had been given a clean specimen, entirely free of modern contamination. 

Once it was made public, Mary’s discovery was not believed by many professionals in the field. Biochemists and paleontologists greeted her work with “howls of skepticism.” They could not believe that organic molecules “could survive for tens of millions of years.” So Schweitzer and her postdoc, Elena Schroeter, repeated their investigations with extreme care to avoid any possibility of contamination. 

Very recently (February 2017), their new investigations were published—and they are now believed. One expert, who had been skeptical before, called Schweitzer’s recent paper a “milestone” and said he is now “fully convinced beyond a reasonable doubt the evidence is authentic.” Now that they have shown that ancient molecules can survive over very long time periods, a new path to scientific investigation has emerged -- “to pin down the evolutionary relationships among different dinosaurs, as well as among ancient mammals and other extinct creatures.” The Science magazine article concludes, “Says Schweitzer: ‘The door is now open.’” 

The story of Mary Schweitzer’s discoveries and persistence provides us with a wonderful example of how major new information can come from seeing things differently, asking basic questions never asked before, taking risks and recognizing something unexpected, seeing something that others could not see — seeing something that could have been recognized by others. But they did not see it. It was Mary who saw what others could not see — or would not see. 

(From Seeing What Others Cannot See, T. G. West, pages 130-132. Of course, it is perhaps highly significant that Mary Schweitzer is dyslexic, as is her professor and mentor, Jack Horner, science advisor for the four “Jurassic Park” films.)