Using the small to learn about the large

It’s time to talk about dinosaurs again.

I love writing these posts because I have to do research, and I end up learning something new about one of my favorite subjects. (One reason I am moving to Bozeman, Montana, is because of dinosaurs.)

We’ve probably all seen gigantic dinosaur skeletons in museums. They are amazing, but most of the time, these animals were not discovered by themselves. Often, instead of one animal being found fossilized in the ground, there are many different types of dinosaurs scattered around a dig site.

One of the challenges paleontologists face is figuring out which bone belongs to which animal. If the dinosaurs were buried quickly, the related bones might be in the correct location. More often than not, the bones are disturbed by flooding, landslides, or being eaten by other animals, so it can be hard to tell which bones go together.

That is where science comes to the rescue.

In the early days, paleontologists had to use their knowledge of animals past and present to piece the dinosaurs back together. Today they have hi-tech tools to help them, including the microscope.

How does using an instrument that looks at small things help identify something as large as a dinosaur bone? Scientists take a tiny core sample from the fossil and look at it under the microscope. They can then learn the animal’s age when it died, an extremely useful bit of information.

If you have two bones that look like they might come from the same dinosaur, but one belongs to an animal that died ten years before the other, you know they don’t belong together. With this information, we can more accurately assemble dinosaurs and know for sure what the animal looked like, at least on the inside.

I think this is clever. It’s a simple way to answer a complicated question. Unfortunately, by using this technique, museum directors are discovering that some of their dinosaurs are not as accurate as they could be.

This is why science is so fun. We are always improving our knowledge. By thinking outside the box, we can use the small to learn about the large.