These are the comments I posted on talk.origins shortly after Ed Conrad's visit.

Ed Conrad visited my lab today to take a look at his
specimen and a few others on my video microscope. The
end result, I think, is that Ed was willing to concede
that there are some major difficulties in interpreting
his specimen as bone, but he is not going to give up
yet.

I must say that this was a very cordial visit. In
person, Ed does not seem as wild-eyed and irrational as
some of his posts imply -- further evidence that the
Net strips away the mannered veneer we need to maintain
a civil discourse! My general impression is that he is
simply a stubborn, determined individual who will not
give up in his pursuits. This is probably a very good
quality in a journalist, but not quite so admirable in
scientific inquiry, in which half the struggle is in
admitting failure when you reach a dead end.

We did a number of things. We had 3 sectioned
specimens: a piece of human bone from our teaching
labs, a dinosaur bone section from Andrew MacRae, and
the sectioned specimen of putative bone, collected by
Conrad and sliced by MacRae. Ed also brought several of
his specimens and a piece of human bone, from which he
took some scrapings.

We examined all of these specimens on my Nikon video
microscope, an Olympus stereomicroscope, and Ed's own
microscope, which he had brought along. Ed's microscope
was useful for point of comparison and so that I could
finally see what he has been using all this time. It's
an old portable scope with 3 objectives (10x, 30x, and
50x) and a 10-15x zoom ocular. The lenses are
completely uncorrected--I saw the circular structures
he has reported, and can say that they are optical
artifacts, diffraction patterns and severe chromatic
aberrations. You _can_ see Haversian canals in thin
sections of bone with this scope, but they are pretty
murky.

You can also see the canals quite clearly on the
Olympus stereomicroscope, which has only a 0.9-4x zoom
objective. It really does not take much magnification
to see these things!

The real test was the examination of the specimens on
the Nikon. Again, magnification proved to be non-
critical: the Haversian structure in human bone was
easily visible with a 4x or 10x objective, although we
did look briefly with a 16x objective. We didn't even
consider using my 40x or 60x lenses, which would have
been serious overkill. Most of the observations were
made with a 10x/0.3NA objective, and a setting of 0.8x
on the optizoom. The final resolution of our digitized
images was about 1.0 micrometers/pixel, so the field of
view was roughly half a millimeter.

The conclusions: Scrapings from human bone or from Ed's
specimen looked essentially identical. This is not to
imply that Ed's specimen was bone, however; no
Haversian structure was visible, and basically what we
were viewing was granular, rough-edged chunks of
mineral, whether bone or stone was irrelevant.

The sections of human and fossilized dinosaur bone
looked nearly identical in dimension, although I will
concede that the Haversian structures were slightly
larger in this sample of dinosaur bone. The differences
were minor, however. The structures were clear and
unambiguous at all levels of magnification used.

No comparable image of Ed's specimen could be acquired.
The structures were very granular, with an irregular,
variable density. There were clear spots scattered
throughout the specimen that might have the approximate
dimensions of the central canals in bone, but none of
the surrounding structure was consistent with bone.
There was also no evidence that these spaces had any
longitudinal continuity, so I'm inclined to accept
MacRae's interpretation that these are simply
transparent grains of quartz.

I've posted 3 images to
<http://fishnet.bio.temple.edu/bone.html>. These were
taken according to Ed's previous request: each was
taken one after the other with the optics left
unchanged, except to adjust the focus. One is human
bone, the second is dinosaur fossil bone, and the last
is MacRae's section of Ed's specimen. Take a look and
make your own judgement.

Ed's parting words were that he admits to some
difficulties, but he is not giving up. I'm sure he will
post his own interpretations soon enough. I will say
that he was a congenial guest, and that if he thinks of
any other tests he would like to make on my equipment,
he is welcome to stop by again and give it another try.

--
Paul Myers