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.”
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the week of May 23 – May 28
News for
the week of May 16 – May 21
