Platecarpus tympaniticus, an extinct aquatic lizard from the Cretaceous period (145.5 million to 65.6 million years ago).

By Elaine Iandoli

At the age of five, Brian Beatty, Ph.D., commandeered his mother’s colander to search behind his Florida home for remnants of prehistoric life. Kneeling in the backyard stream, dipping and lifting the strainer, the young Beatty discovered an 8-million-year-old rib fragment from a sea cow.

A fossil hunter was born.

The brown palm-sized bone rests today in Beatty’s office at NYIT’s College of Osteopathic Medicine, a symbol of his passion for paleontology, the study of evolutionary life through fossil records.

Beatty, an assistant professor of anatomy, has like-minded company at NYIT, where six paleontologists teach anatomy to first-year medical and health professions students. Among their responsibilities is introducing the students to an academic milestone: the semester-long dissection of a human cadaver. 

Beyond the anatomy lab, the group’s global treks to remote locations have led to fossil finds in Mongolia’s Gobi desert, Kenya’s Rusinga Island, and South Africa’s Karoo Basin. Amid bones lying unclassified in museum basements around the world, they delve into “deep time” to study the fossil record and generate data-driven hypotheses about the evolution of species ranging from the rhino-like Brontotheres—the mighty 50-million-year-old “thunder beast”—to Basiliscus basiliscus, a modern-day water-skipping lizard.

“We’re all evolutionary anatomists,” says Robert Hill, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the anatomy department who is a specialist in the study of crocodiles and dinosaurs, including the 75-million-year-old Pinacosaurus. “Every fossil that’s found is a new data point and has the potential to modify or revolutionize the way we think about the natural world.”

NYIT’s anatomy experts also draw on other scientific disciplines, including ecology, biology, geology, histology (the study of tissues), and pathology. With encyclopedic knowledge about a vast pageant of creatures that slithered, crawled, swam, or walked millions of years ago (in other words, our relatives), paleontologists are well suited to teach human gross anatomy. Among the truths they share through their research and scholarship is that the tree of life displays an undisputed interconnectedness among species, evident when comparing tire-sized dinosaur vertebrae with tiny spinal bones of a dime-sized lizard or the flippers of the primitive dolphin with a human arm.

“We’re all anatomically the same,” says Professor of Anatomy Nikos Solounias, Ph.D., one of the world’s experts on giraffe evolution and anatomy. “Evolution just changes the shape of body structures.”

Students and non-students alike, Solounias notes, are often unaware how similar all animals are, and that humans are not as unique as we might believe. 

“That realization doesn’t lower humans, it just makes humans unexceptional,” says Solounias. “The only thing we have that makes humans different is how smart we are.”

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