Mary Schweitzer, a native of Helena, Montana, took an unusual path into paleontology: she earned a B.S. in Communicative Disorders from Utah State University in 1977 and only returned to science years later, after marrying and raising three children, when she took a paleontology course "for fun" taught by Jack Horner. That course led to a doctorate -- a Ph.D. in Biology from Montana State University in 1995, supervised by Horner himself -- and a career studying dinosaur tissue at the molecular level.[2]
In 2005, Schweitzer and her co-authors reported something that shouldn't have been possible: flexible, transparent blood vessel structures and soft tissue recovered from inside a demineralized thighbone of a Tyrannosaurus rex (specimen MOR 1125) unearthed in Montana's Hell Creek Formation in 2000. The bone also let researchers determine, for the first time, the sex of an individual dinosaur -- medullary bone tissue identified the animal as a female that had been carrying eggs. The findings reopened a long-settled scientific question: what, if anything, of an organism's original biology can actually survive tens of millions of years of fossilization.[1][2]
Now at North Carolina State University, Schweitzer's work has pushed toward recovering fragments of actual dinosaur proteins, including collagen, from fossil bone -- a claim that drew, and continues to draw, significant skepticism from parts of the paleontology community, given how implausible long-term protein survival was long assumed to be. Her lab continues to investigate exactly how, and how often, this kind of preservation happens.[1]