Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer says MSU's Imaging and Chemical Analysis Laboratory is invaluable to her research.

"Oh my gosh. Look at this. It's beautiful," Schweitzer exclaimed as she and Equall, a technical and research staff member in MSU's Imaging and Chemical Analysis Laboratory, examined fragments of a thigh bone that belonged to an 80-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur belonging to the hadrosaur family.

Just three weeks earlier, the dinosaur femur had rested in the Judith River Formation of northern Montana, buried under a deep layer of sandstone. Now its fragments emerged as black-and-white images on a computer screen. Equall was operating the Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope that produced those images. Beside her was Schweitzer, a Helena native and former MSU graduate student who studied with famed MSU paleontologist Jack Horner. Schweitzer, now a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, is known world-wide for her discoveries in soft dinosaur tissues.

"Oh, Nancy. That's beautiful," Schweitzer said. "Wow."

The bone fragments, magnified hundreds of times, looked at times like shadowy caves, then thorny trees and flood-flattened grass. For a few moments, they seemed to contain two tiny crop circles or maybe an early logo for MasterCard.

Schweitzer was more interested in significance, however, than the odd images that result from enlarging fossils beyond recognition. She seemed to find it, but said she would have to use several instruments and various methods to test her initial observations. For now, she wanted to take a quick look to see what she had, and ICAL's equipment made it possible.

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