Monday, December 5, 2011

MSU lab manager shares microscopic pictures of dinosaur bones with growing audience

Dinosaur Bones

dinosaur bone that Ellen-Thérèse Lamm produces and the colorful images taken of those fossils underneath a Montana State University microscope still gain new audiences. So far this year, the manager of the Gabriel Lab for Cellular and Molecular Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies (MOR) has revealed analysis with MOR Curator of Paleontology and MSU's Regents' Professor Jack Horner during a French scientific journal, created a 2012 MOR calendar, been featured in a trade magazine and been chosen as a finalist in a global photomicrography contest.

The microscopic structure of dinosaur frills at completely different stages of growth was described and analyzed during a paper Lamm co-authored with Horner. The paper was published in April in Comptes Rendus Palevol a French journal of paleontology and evolutionary sciences. Lamm created the thin-section slides used in this research to capture the photographs for her and Horner's publication, which described the distinctive tissue growth strategies that Triceratops used to ultimately grow such a massive expanded frill.

The photomicrographs were taken with a polarized light-weight microscope, which enables scientists to control light-weight conditions to analyze the optical qualities of a sample, Lamm said. Polarized light-weight passing through a thin-section of bone is split at different angles depending on the structure and organization of the crystal structures. It is then re-collected by an analyzer and delivered to the attention during a variety of colors and patterns.

"The pictures are not only stunning and intriguing, but indicate differing kinds of biological tissue, as well as show the orientation of fibers in the original bone," Lamm said."The images are not stunning and intriguing, however indicate different types of biological tissue, as well as show the orientation of fibers in the original bone," Lamm said.

No comments:

Post a Comment