Chuck Finsley Memorial Lecture

The Chuck Finsley Memorial Lecture series will feature Dr. Mary Schweitzer speaking at Brookhaven College, Thursday, March 29 at 7:00 pm.  She will speak on "T-Rex Under the Microscope".  The lecture is FREE and open to the Public.  Space is limited at the meeting site so hopefully you have registered using the Event Brite website. 

Dr. Mary Schweitzer, Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, will deliver a free lecture on "T. rex under the Microscope" on Thursday, March 29th at 7:00 pm.  The lecture will be held at the Brookhaven College Geotechnology Institute (Building H) on the campus of Brookhaven College, 3939 Valley View Lane, Farmers Branch, Texas.  The lecture is free but seating is limited, so online registration is strongly encouraged.  There will be reception for Dr. Schweitzer afterwards in the adjoining room.

Dr. Schweitzer earned her BS in Communicative Disorders from Utah State University in 1977, and then her Ph. D. in Biology in 1995 from Montana State University.  Working in Jack Horner's lab at the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State, she stunned the paleontological world in 2005 by identifying soft tissues, blood vessels and even cells, preserved in a fossil of Tyrannosaurus rex.  This was followed by two papers in 2007, one of analyses that suggested soft tissue from T. rex was actually protein, and another that compared protein sequences from mastodon and T. rex.  Since then she has co-authored over 100 papers on soft tissue preservation and molecular paleontology.  Although not yet replicated by other groups, this work has nonetheless altered our perception of fossilization, the potential for the preservation of soft tissues, and what can be learned from these materials.  At North Carolina State, she heads a molecular paleontology research group and is also the research curator of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.  That museum houses the most complete specimen of Acrocanthosaurus, a high-spined theropod dinosaur which was probably one of the track makers at Dinosaur Valley State Park, which was found in southeastern Oklahoma not far from Dallas.

The Dallas Paleontological Society is proud to present this talk for our 2018 installment of the Chuck Finsley Lecture Series, in honor of the former curator of the Dallas Museum of Nature and Science (now the Perot Museum), and the founding force of the society.