With the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex sitting atop his desk, a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and nearly five dozen published research articles under his belt, Lawrence Witmer — or Larry as he calls himself — could teach the average Joe a thing or two about dinosaurs.

And teach he does.

“Dinosaurs provide a real opportunity for outreach to the general public in terms of science education,” Witmer says. “We can capitalize on that interest and promote science in general, which I think benefits all science.”

Witmer, an associate anatomy professor in Department of Biomedical Sciences, enjoys educating the public on his research involving the biology of the extinct dinosaur species and their relatives.

“We're different from other dinosaur labs. We spend a lot of time working on modern animals and modern relatives,” he says. “We work on a number of exciting animals, such as ostrich, alligators and moose.”

Witmer says he and his fellow researchers get to “breathe the life back into the dinosaurs” as they reconstruct the biology of the extinct species.

He recently was granted another National Science Foundation (NSF) grant — he has two others — that helps him dig deeper into the heads of archosaurs. The NSF grant funds Witmer’s research project, “Brain evolution in archosaurs: new implications for scaling, function, and the evolution of the modern conditions in birds and crocodilians.” The grant is for $171, 262 over a three-year period.

An earlier $280,000 NSF three-year grant (“Ear regions of archosaurs: the transition to the modern avian and crocodilian conditions and functional implications for hearing and balance in dinosaurs”) looks at ear structures and what they can tell us about hearing, behavior and balance in dinosaurs, crocodiles and pterodactyls.

“The head is where the action is,” says Witmer. “If you understand what’s going on in it, you understand the animal.”

His latest research project will utilize the latest in high-resolution CT scanning and 3D-computer visualization to peer into the skulls of dinosaurs and their modern relatives to reconstruct the size and shape of the brain.

“A major objective is to explore how major changes in brain structure track shifts in organismal form and function,” says Witmer, “such as the evolution of flight, sociality and different feeding styles.” He expects that the most sophisticated visualizations of cranial structures to date will be possible because of recent refinements in the scanning and modeling technologies involved.

By the way, asks the average Joe amongst us, what is “scaling?” The stuff you scrape off fish before frying them? Not really.

“Scaling,” he says, “involves how bodily features or organs change in size relative to the size of the animal as the animal grows and matures.” For instance, he says, the size of the eyes in humans becomes smaller — relative to the rest of the body — as humans grow from infants to adults.

Scaling allows anatomists to more accurately understand organs and their structures in terms of functional importance and roles — particularly when making comparisons of the same organs or structures in larger and smaller dinosaurs, says Witmer.

Because of his ability to speak clearly and succinctly, he is called upon by reporters from all across the globe to be quoted in science stories.

And from CNN to National Public Radio to the Discovery Channel, Witmer has been on just about all of them.

His most recent venture with the media was interviews with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

The subject? Someone else’s research. Witmer prefers to speak in public interviews primarily on his own research, but with reporters calling from Argentina, Spain, Italy, among other places, looking for comments on other scientists' work, Witmer agreed to be interviewed as a guest expert discussing an article in Science.

“It’s an important part of my job,” he says, “to help science reporters — who are the liaison with the general public — get the story straight.”

He may not seem like the typical anatomy teacher, carrying an expertise in the make-up of dinosaurs, but according to Witmer, that’s what makes him so unique and beneficial to the anatomy classroom.

“What I can bring is a passion for the structure of the body,” he says. “We’re built much the same way as dinosaurs. The parts are just arranged a little differently.”

Witmer was recently honored as an Ohio University Presidential Research Scholar in Biomedical & Life Sciences from 2004-2009. Acceptance as a research scholar requires the recommendation of a university committee, followed by the president’s approval.

“It’s a great honor,” he says of the award. “It’s the recognition of success in research, and it carries with it a small amount of research money. The money will allow me to do things I normally wouldn’t be able to do, such as take students to international conferences.”

Witmer says he plans to use the research money to conduct laboratory work with his students, who continually keep him energized about science.

“I love the students at OU-COM. They’re really wonderful people,” he says. “They constantly challenge and excite me. I really like this environment; it’s a genuinely friendly, human place to work.”