Free How to Build a Dinosaur by Jack Horner

skulls but tissues, cells, and molecules, starting with protein and perhaps, one day, even moving on to DNA.
    Mary had been working on the edge of this frontier of paleontological research for a good ten years by the time she picked up the piece of B. rex femur and declared the dinosaur to be female and pregnant. The path she had taken to scientific research was not a straight line from college to graduate school. In 1989, when she first audited a class I was giving at Montana State, she had just finished a science education certification program. She was married, raising three children, and working as a substitute teacher.
    “I finished my teaching certification in the middle of the year. I loved going to school and I saw that Jack was teaching a course and I told him, ‘I really want to sit in on your class.’ ”
    So she signed up for a course on evolution. From her point of view the experience was mixed. “I ended up working incredibly hard, for no academic credit,” she says, “and I got a C, which I still don’t think was a fair grade. But it got me hooked. It really did. I realized that there was far more evidence for dinosaur-bird linkages, for evolution, for all these different things, than a layperson would begin to understand. And when I really got to looking at that, it sort of changed my way of thinking, my worldview.”
    She had come to class as a young earth creationist, meaning that she believed the earth had been created some thousands of years ago. It was a view she held more or less by default. Many of her friends were young earth creationists, and although she was well versed in basic biology and other sciences, she had not studied evolutionary biology or given the subject a great deal of thought. “Like many hard-core young earth creationists,” she says, “I didn’t understand the evidence. When I realized the strength of the data, the evidence, I had to rethink things.”
    Whenever people talk about the conflict between science and religion I think of Mary. She is a person of strong religious faith that she says has only gotten stronger as she has learned more about science. Her faith is personal, and it is not something she brings up in conversation, but when asked, she is open and clear about it. She says the strength of the evidence for the process of evolution and the several-billion-year-old age of the earth is a separate matter from moral values or belief in God. She came to the study of paleontology from a background in which the assumption was that “people study evolution trying to find a way around God and his laws.” Instead, she came to see science as a strictly defined process for gathering and evaluating evidence. “When I talk to Christian groups or when I teach in my class, I explain that ‘science is like football.’ There is a set of rules and everybody follows the same rules. The young earth creationists play basketball on the same field. It’s not pretty.” The essential question is whether a conclusion or hypothesis is supported by data or not. And that is separate, she says, from “things that I know to be true” in other realms, such as faith and morality.
    Her approach fits well with the way I try to teach science, whether to graduate students or undergraduates who are majoring in art history. I don’t present a worldview or a set of answers, but a process, a method. A discussion about the age of the earth, for example, would not begin with the answers, but with the question of how we pursue an answer, and the simple set of rules that govern scientific research in pursuit of answers. No student in a class of mine has to believe anything I say, or anything that anyone else says. But if we are doing science, we have to deal with evidence.
    After Mary finished that first course, she started working as a volunteer in our lab at the Museum of the Rockies. She became more and more interested in some of the work. “I had so many questions,” she says. After about a