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.
- 30 -
News for
the week of
March 20
– March 25
