Pennsylvania Scientist, 80, Probes Origins of Early Life

PITTSBURGH-- Mary Dawson has a saying: "Old paleontologists never die. Their knees just give out."

Sitting in her cozy, cluttered office in the back corridors of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Dawson grins at what she calls her "bum knee" and notes that she is 80 years old -- but otherwise this pioneering student of life's beginnings is showing no signs of hanging up her pickax.

Ten years ago, she told the Post-Gazette that the Arctic "was no longer an option for me. I'm an orthopedic surgeon's nightmare."

She appears to have proven the doctors wrong. Not only has Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, visited Canada's High Arctic five times in the past decade, where she helped discover an entirely new species of animal, she's already planning to return there the summer after next.

"I'm retired, but all that means is I don't have to go to meetings or correct papers. I can do exactly what I want to do," she says, with a glance around her office, jammed with books, maps, a microscope, an enormous computer and, at a nearby desk, dozens of small plastic and cardboard boxes, each containing a tiny bone fragment of a fossil rodent from millions of years ago.

In the meantime, she continues to rack up honors. Recently, a $50,000 pre-doctoral fellowship was endowed in Dawson's name by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, providing individual $3,000 grants to students. The society in 2002 had awarded her the A.S. Romer-G.G. Simpson Medal, its highest honor. She was the first American woman to receive this.

Besides being widely recognized as one of the greatest fossil researchers of her time, whose discoveries have rewritten textbooks, Ms. Dawson might also be the first octogenarian paleontologist to appear on the cover of an in-flight airline magazine -- the July-August 2010 issue of Above and Beyond, to be exact, published by First Air, "The Airline of the North."

"The Search for a Missing Link," the headline reads, and inside are full-color photos of Dawson and her much younger colleagues, in glowing, rude health, at their campsite on Canada's Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island in the world. There is also, tellingly, another photo of Dawson's colleague climbing out of the arctic mud, her all-terrain vehicle sinking in the background.

And therein, Dawson says, lies a story:

In 2007, she'd accompanied these younger paleontologists to Haughton crater, created 39 million years ago by a meteorite and named in honor of Samuel Haughton, a late 19th-century professor of geology at Trinity College in Dublin. At one time a lake, the crater is not only considered a trove of fossils, it's used as a stand-in for scientists researching life on Mars.

But on this trip, discoveries had been few, and one day, "By golly, our ATV ran out of gas," Dawson recalled. Several members of the group decided to walk back to camp for fuel while Dawson and a younger colleague, Elizabeth Ross -- "an undergraduate at Carleton University, a really great gal" -- stayed behind to wait. Ross was aimlessly scuffing the ground with her foot when suddenly she kicked up an object, picked it up and showed it to Dawson, who immediately knew it was something different.

"By the time the others got back with the gas, we were really excited, crawling around finding all these bones," she said, and indeed, what they'd found was an ancient carnivorous animal, a terrestrial seal. Not only was it a new species of animal but a new genus. It provided the missing link between terrestrial, or land-inhabitating, mammals and marine mammals -- seals, sea lions, walruses -- that swim in the oceans today.

There was only one problem. While the group managed to reconstruct most of the skeleton, perhaps the most important piece, a back part of the skull, was missing, which made it impossible to formally identify it.

Not to worry: The next summer, the team returned, and on the first day, its photographer, Martin Lipman, walked up to the first oddly shaped object he saw, "picked up this rock and said, `Is this anything?' "

Dawson hoots with laughter at the memory. Of course it was the missing piece of the skull, and their discovery would be published in Nature, the prestigious science journal, to much acclaim.

All of this is by way of saying that for Dawson, paleontology is as much, if not more, about the painfully slow, often frustrating process of field work as it is about gazing into a computer or a scanning electron microscope, but these days too many younger paleontologists seem less interested in the former than in the latter.

"Younger students don't seem to want to go out on field projects as much. Instead they want to follow up on the anatomy of these creatures," a trend, she says, that is full-blown in the field of geology, where geologists rarely go out anymore to examine road "cuts," the slices of earth revealed when highways cut into mountains, opting for computerized versions instead.

Still, the field is an exciting place to be for those trying to document Earth's 4.5 billion-year history, she says, although even as some countries open up, others become off-limits.

Where are the best places to dig? She answers quickly: "China. That's where the action is. It's just wild. Africa is getting more interesting, although Libya," and she pauses, regretfully, "it was just starting to open up, but now it will be a while."

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History has undergone its own shifts since she first arrived in the early 1960s -- when she was told by a museum official, Graham Netting, that, as a woman, she'd never be made curator.

Ten years later, Netting appointed her to that post at the museum, which houses the fourth largest collection of fossil vertebrates in the world. The museum's basement famously houses crates and crates of dinosaur bones in plaster, dating from Andrew Carnegie's era, that have yet to be unpacked -- although one recent foray yielded the first known hind feet of the stegosaurus.

While there were some rocky moments as the venerable institution struggled to bring itself into the Internet era, she is particularly happy these days with the new dinosaur hall.

"It's very serious," she says. "It uses modern exhibit techniques that oriented around actual specimens, which is crucial. And the specimens have been conserved and restored and are in much better shape than they were before."

Despite her own bad knee, Dawson is in pretty good shape herself -- still traveling to conferences around the world and still making the trek every day to the Museum of Natural History from her sheep farm outside of Saxonburg, although a recent two-hour commute out of town through a snowstorm nearly defeated her.

But it didn't.

"I will keep at it for as long as I can. After all," she shrugs, "what's the alternative?"