Mary Schweitzer

Jonathan Bartlett

Paleontologist & molecular biologist, Raleigh, North Carolina

Mary Schweitzer’s career has faced scrutiny since the beginning, and the whole thing was accidental, she said. After working other jobs, she pursued an interest in medicine while balancing the responsibilities of motherhood. But on a whim, she audited the class of Jack Horner, the paleontologist who advised the Jurassic Park movies. Fascinated, she switched paths and began her PhD, helping with a Tyrannosaurus rex that Horner found in 1992.

Her old medical interests immediately affected the trajectory of her newfound career.

“I kept smelling something very odd” in the dinosaur bones, she recalled. It reminded her of smells in the campus cadaver labs. Most paleontologists came from a geology background, so “it didn’t dawn on them that it smelled,” she said. “Nothing has an odor unless it has organics associated with it.”

She analyzed the bone and found blood vessels, cells, and collagen inside—evidence of living tissue inside dinosaur bones millions of years old. “To put it mildly, my thesis was not well accepted in the grander community,” she said.

In 2000, another T. rex was discovered and she attempted to repeat the analysis, the results of which were published in Science in 2005.

“Since then, we’ve tried really hard to replicate it and provide chemical data,” said Schweitzer, who is now at North Carolina State University. Her lab has expanded to other specimen and tissue types, and a lab in Sweden has replicated her findings in a sample from another dig.

“I’m not doing what I do for attention,” she said. “I’m utterly fascinated by the world God made, so I just try to ignore what other people say and just do the work in a way that God’s blessed me to do.”

When Schweitzer started, there were maybe four women in the field, she said. Now there are as many up-and-coming women in paleontology as men, and most of them have a biology background like herself.

In her observation, women spend less time in the field than men, partly due to family commitments. But it’s allowed many women to ask questions around what they can analyze in the lab. “It affects the questions we ask and how we address those questions, and I think it makes the whole field a lot stronger,” she said.

Also in this series

Also in this issue

This month’s cover story examines the power of communal confession to heal the church’s—and society’s—deepest divisions. But pastor and writer Jeff Peabody doesn’t point to the early church or to liturgical traditions as the model for how we should pray; he turns to the famous ancient prayer of Daniel at the end of Israel’s long Babylonian exile. The prayer upends our typical notions of what it means to “speak prophetically,” and the implications for our fractious cultural and political moment are striking.

Cover Story

Forgive Us Our Sins (And Theirs, Too)

Set Free by the Cross, Why Do We Live in Bondage?

New Editor, Old Roots

The Motherly Love of a Wrathful God

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Democratic Christians Weigh Their Primary Concerns

Real Love Requires a Command

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Have You Noticed Church Is Farther Away Than it Used to Be?

María de los Ángeles La Torre Cuadros

Why Do Fewer Christian Women Work in Science?

Twelve Christian Women in Science You Should Know

Erica Carlson

Joanna Ng

Audrey Bowden

Margaret Miller

Lydia Manikonda

Jessica Moerman

Keila Natilde Lopez

Georgia Dunston

Mercy Akinyi

Alynne MacLean

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I Assumed Science Had All the Answers. Then I Started Asking Inconvenient Questions.

The Old Testament Twins We’ve Forgotten

Our March Issue: Us vs. Us

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Christian Martyr Numbers Down by Half in a Decade. Or Are They?

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Despite a Murder and Visa Denials, Christians Persevere in Turkey

The Many Faces of Narcissism in the Church

Review

Religious Parents Are Remarkably Similar, Even When They Belong to Different Religions

Review

Be Careful About Reading the Bible as a Political Guide

New & Noteworthy Books

Excerpt

My Generation Prized ‘Authenticity.’ Why I’ve Come to Love Wearing a Mask.

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Why German Evangelicals Are Praising God in English

View issue

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Eight Divine Names in One Glorious Passage

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