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Authors: Jack Horner
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to break the jacket in two—is what led us to look at the tissue inside the bone.
2
IT’S A GIRL!
A PREGNANCY TEST FOR T. REX
By the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding.
—Robert Hooke
W hen we broke the plaster cast of the B. rex femur in two so that a helicopter could lift it from the site of the demolished cliff, we exposed extremely well-preserved tissue from the interior of a fossil that had lasted sixty-eight million years. It was that long ago that B. rex, an ovulating Tyrannosaurus, had moved through the lush thickets and forests of a delta fed by several winding rivers. She had hatched, and spent sixteen to twenty years growing to maturity before she mated.
Whether this was her first mating or not, we can’t tell. Perhaps she died without offspring. Perhaps she had shepherded a clutch of eggs to hatching before. From the point of view of the present it may seem poignant that B. rex was living near the end of the 140-million-year reign of dinosaurs on earth, as if she were one of the last of her line. But she was only near the end in the terms of geological time. There were three million years to go before the end of the Cretaceous.
She died of unknown causes, but we do know that her burial was quick because her skeleton was well preserved, most of it, including the femur, encased in the tons of rock we had to remove with jackhammers. In fact, this femur was still in its matrix of rock inside the plaster jacket. Where we broke the jacket the bone had not been coated with any protective chemical, which is the common process for fossils found exposed to the elements. We paint them with a chemical preservative so that they will not disintegrate further, at least in external form and shape. But preserving the bone from further damage from water and weather may damage it for laboratory analysis, because the preservative can seep in and alter the very chemicals we are looking for.
Like so much in science, there was a bit of luck involved. Bad luck for the crew that had to break the cast open, and good luck for Mary Schweitzer, the beneficiary. I am fairly willing to break open fossils or cut thin sections to view under a microscope. I’m in favor of pulverizing some fossil material for chemical analysis. But without this unplanned break I doubt that we would have taken the B. rex femur back to the museum and snapped it in two. B. rex was a superb and hard-won fossil skeleton. Mary was looking for well-preserved fossil bone that had not been chemically treated, and she and I both had hopes for what she might find. But I’m not sure I would have picked this particular femur.
But necessity can be the mother of research material as well as invention. And when we saw the inside of the femur, and smelled it—fossils from Hell Creek tend to have a strong odor, which may have something to do with the organic material preserved—it was clear that this was prime material for Mary.
So we packed the bits of T. rex thighbone up and Mary took them with her to North Carolina State University, where she was starting her first semester as an assistant professor. For the previous ten years she had been studying and working at the museum, digging deep into the microscopic structure of fossilized bone tissue, and now she was leaving just about the time we were returning from the field season in August.
Mary snapped up the fragments. “I packed up the box,” she said, “and brought it with me to Raleigh, and as soon as we got there my technician, Jen [Jennifer Wittmeyer]—I could not have done any of this without her—she said, ‘What do you want to do first?’ I said I had plans for the T. rex bone. So we pulled out the first piece of bone from the box and I said, ‘My gosh, it’s a girl and its pregnant.’
“I picked it up and I turned it over and the inside surface was coated with
2
IT’S A GIRL!
A PREGNANCY TEST FOR T. REX
By the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding.
—Robert Hooke
W hen we broke the plaster cast of the B. rex femur in two so that a helicopter could lift it from the site of the demolished cliff, we exposed extremely well-preserved tissue from the interior of a fossil that had lasted sixty-eight million years. It was that long ago that B. rex, an ovulating Tyrannosaurus, had moved through the lush thickets and forests of a delta fed by several winding rivers. She had hatched, and spent sixteen to twenty years growing to maturity before she mated.
Whether this was her first mating or not, we can’t tell. Perhaps she died without offspring. Perhaps she had shepherded a clutch of eggs to hatching before. From the point of view of the present it may seem poignant that B. rex was living near the end of the 140-million-year reign of dinosaurs on earth, as if she were one of the last of her line. But she was only near the end in the terms of geological time. There were three million years to go before the end of the Cretaceous.
She died of unknown causes, but we do know that her burial was quick because her skeleton was well preserved, most of it, including the femur, encased in the tons of rock we had to remove with jackhammers. In fact, this femur was still in its matrix of rock inside the plaster jacket. Where we broke the jacket the bone had not been coated with any protective chemical, which is the common process for fossils found exposed to the elements. We paint them with a chemical preservative so that they will not disintegrate further, at least in external form and shape. But preserving the bone from further damage from water and weather may damage it for laboratory analysis, because the preservative can seep in and alter the very chemicals we are looking for.
Like so much in science, there was a bit of luck involved. Bad luck for the crew that had to break the cast open, and good luck for Mary Schweitzer, the beneficiary. I am fairly willing to break open fossils or cut thin sections to view under a microscope. I’m in favor of pulverizing some fossil material for chemical analysis. But without this unplanned break I doubt that we would have taken the B. rex femur back to the museum and snapped it in two. B. rex was a superb and hard-won fossil skeleton. Mary was looking for well-preserved fossil bone that had not been chemically treated, and she and I both had hopes for what she might find. But I’m not sure I would have picked this particular femur.
But necessity can be the mother of research material as well as invention. And when we saw the inside of the femur, and smelled it—fossils from Hell Creek tend to have a strong odor, which may have something to do with the organic material preserved—it was clear that this was prime material for Mary.
So we packed the bits of T. rex thighbone up and Mary took them with her to North Carolina State University, where she was starting her first semester as an assistant professor. For the previous ten years she had been studying and working at the museum, digging deep into the microscopic structure of fossilized bone tissue, and now she was leaving just about the time we were returning from the field season in August.
Mary snapped up the fragments. “I packed up the box,” she said, “and brought it with me to Raleigh, and as soon as we got there my technician, Jen [Jennifer Wittmeyer]—I could not have done any of this without her—she said, ‘What do you want to do first?’ I said I had plans for the T. rex bone. So we pulled out the first piece of bone from the box and I said, ‘My gosh, it’s a girl and its pregnant.’
“I picked it up and I turned it over and the inside surface was coated with
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