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Home > Featured Stories > Outside the Classroom > July 2008 > Boning Up On ResearchBoning Up on Research
In 2005, Dr. Mary Schweitzer’s discovered soft tissue inside the bone of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex.
By Tracey Peake, News Services
School may be out for the summer, but that doesn't mean that the work has stopped at NC State. Our professors and students spend their summers on campus and in the field, continuing the groundbreaking work that makes NC State the number one science and technology research institution in North Carolina.
According to Dr. Chris Brown, assistant vice chancellor for research, our faculty and students are involved in everything from creating nanotextiles that can filter impurities from human blood to observing huge supernova explosions to figure out what makes the universe tick.
"We're really a 24/7, 365-days-a-year institution," Brown says, "and our projects encompass everything from the nanoscale to the universal scale, in areas from ranging from astronomy to zoology."
Or paleontology. If you think that scientific research is synonymous with indoor lab work, think again.
Paleontologist Dr. Mary Schweitzer is taking her research on the road-literally. Schweitzer usually spends her summers in Montana's big sky country excavating dinosaur bones. This year, she and her colleagues will have some extra help in the form of a mobile paleontology lab-the first of its kind-that will enable the researchers to do molecular analysis on the bones that they find before they can degrade.
Schweitzer, who managed to extract original soft tissue from the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex, believes that fossils buried deep within sandstone gain equilibrium with their environment, so that much of the original tissue is preserved. Unfortunately, when the specimens are unearthed, the equilibrium is disturbed and the fossil degrades quickly. Having the lab equipment on site will be a way for the scientists to document this process, and learn more about these ancient creatures and the process of fossilization itself.
"It's fun. It's cool. It's the first of its kind," Schweitzer says of the mobile lab, although her sentiments could apply just as well to the majority of the summer work happening at – or in some cases, away from – NC State.
