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Discovery of dinosaur soft tissue revolutionizing paleontology - The Bozeman Daily Chronicle

The grossest thing Mary Higby Schweitzer ever did for Science was to saw off the leg of a dead ostrich that had been lying in a North Carolina farmer's field for five days, rotting in the summer heat."I tasted it for the next three weeks," Schweitzer recalled. The longer lasting result, however, was that it helped her discover that the spongy material inside a fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone was actually preserved soft tissue, including what appear to be blood vessels and cells.She also discovered that, when it came to laying eggs, the female T. rex worked very much like the female ostrich, further bolstering the theory that modern birds are descended from dinosaurs.Schweitzer, a mother of three who earned her Ph.D. at Montana State University in 1995 and Now does research at North Carolina State University, talked about her discoveries Tuesday night to a crowd of about 100 at the Museum of the Rockies."It's all new," Jack Horner, the museum's curator of Paleontology, said of her discovery of preserved soft tissue. "It's something that, since vertebrate Paleontology began, no One ever expected. It is just absolutely fantastic.

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