by Jennifer Kowalewski

During the school year, Pat O’Connor, Ph.D., teaches anatomy and neuroscience to first- and second-year medical students. But as warmer weather rolls around, the assistant professor of anatomy at OU-COM packs his bags for a river basin in Tanzania — to search for species long extinct.

“This has taken up a majority of my time outside OU-COM,” says O’Connor, holding out a clear box with a tiny bone fragment. Holding it in his hands, he explained the bone was the lower half of a tiny jaw belonging to a mammal that lived millions of years ago. The specimen represents one of the most complete Cretaceous mammal fossils yet recovered from the African continent and was found during an initial expedition conducted by O’Connor four years ago in Tanzania. “We have been extremely lucky with the number of fossils we have found. My work has kept me very busy.”

O’Connor graduated from Michigan State University with a bachelor of science in anthropology. He completed master’s and Ph.D. degrees in anatomical sciences at Stony Brook University in New York, receiving the doctorate in 2003. While working on his doctorate, O’Connor became an instructor at OU-COM in 200l.

While teaching is a passion, field experiences in Madagascar as a graduate student excited passions for morphology (the study of form) and exploration. In 2002, he blended both by beginning regular treks to Tanzania, which is located in East Africa.

Why East Africa? Due the relative lack of exposed sedimentary rocks on much of the African continent, scientists have not spent a great deal of time exploring for fossils over large portions of the land mass. Thus, their understanding of the history of life in Africa remains shrouded in mystery. However, the shroud is being removed piece by piece. O’Connor and his colleagues — which include his wife, Nancy Stevens, Ph.D., an OU-COM assistant professor of biomedical sciences — have been exploring a massive geologic feature in East Africa known as the great rift system, a feature made up of a series of river basins spanning Ethiopia and Mozambique. With time such rivers cut through underlying sediments and expose rock originally deposited during the Mesozoic Era; in the case of Tanzania, some evidence suggested the presence of fossils in sedimentary rocks.

“Our first week there, we were without any expectations,” O’Connor says. “However, Nancy discovered a dinosaur quarry containing many large sauropod (plant eating dinosaur) fossils. This quarry has kept giving us bone after bone from year to year.”

Such fossil records are snapshots of the past that help to reveal what creatures existed before today and, perhaps, provide a window into how they lived and died. In his work, O’Connor studies animals living today in order to better understand creatures of the past. Using comparative anatomy, scientists, such as O'Connor, can infer how extinct creatures moved, ate or, in general, lived.

At a number of sites in Tanzania, O’Connor and his colleagues have discovered theropods, or predatory dinosaurs of the Cretaceous period, as well as the long-necked plant-eating sauropods. The team has recovered a number of other animals living at the same time, including mammals, crocodiles, turtles, fish and birds. “It’s a very diverse collection of fossils,” he says. “What we are finding includes different kinds of dinosaurs, but there is a good mix of other species, too.”

And although so many bones have already been discovered, O’Connor says he and his group have explored only a small portion within the East African Rift System. There is much more ground to survey, and they intend in the future to push up the river basin.

Field researchers often work in their own region, or “backyard,” so to speak. Going abroad, especially to a place never before investigated, can be a risky venture. However, for O’Connor and his colleagues, it was a 50-year-old geology map showing “Cretaceous-age” sedimentary deposits (i.e., the type of rock best known for preserving fossils) that led them to their decision to investigate the Tanzanian river basin.

Now, four years later, O’Connor has landed a plethora of new fossils and an opportunity to continue exploration, with help from the National Geographic Society. His research has been supported by $80,000 in the past three years from the society, as well as smaller grants from other sources, including the Office of Research and Grants at the college. To keep costs down, O’Connor shares base camp with Stevens.

OU-COM has played a role in his research since the beginning. Himself a product of being taught in a medical school environment, O’Connor loved the opportunity to teach at the college and work with future doctors. He works in both curricula — the Clinical Presentation Continuum and Patient Centered Continuum — so he interacts with all students.

“OU-COM is a fantastic place to teach,” he says. “It has clinical and basic biological researchers working together. The strength of such research diversity, particularly in morphological sciences, is that it connects students with researchers studying all aspects of animal biology. I would like to see us build on the morphology core group. We have a wonderful team now, but I hope we can build onto that in the future.”

His morphology research translates directly to classroom learning, being a tool for him to teach students about anatomy and how muscles, organs and other tissues interplay with each other in the human body.

And that, in turn, can help illuminate the biology of species long gone.