The next generation of doctors could have a better grasp of the evolutionary baggage that has given us low back pain and other common woes.

	Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette
	Dr. Douglas Robertson centers the fossilized skull of a 300 million-year-old trematopid amphibian for a CT Scan. This was part of an announcement of a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Dr. Robertson is an associate professor of radiology.

In a program that will begin next month, University of Pittsburgh medical students can opt to take classes taught by four eminent scientists from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

"It's a unique experiment," said John Lazo, a pharmacologist at Pitt's School of Medicine and a museum board member. "I am unaware of any other medical school that has decided to join forces with a natural history museum."

Students will learn about the history of disease and injury by studying evolution and the fossil record, explained Christopher Beard, head of vertebrate paleontology at the museum.

Everything evolves, he noted. Bacteria become resistant to antibiotics because of adaptation mechanisms. Millions of years ago, humans started to stand upright, freeing up their hands to do other tasks. But that revolutionary transformation created a new burden: back pain.

"Humans, because of our bipedal stance, have a very strange, S-shaped spinal column," Dr. Beard said. "We really were not designed -- pardon the pun -- early on to stand up on our hind limbs."

Through the collaboration, the museum's scientists will be able to use Pitt's tools, such as CT and MRI scanners and electron microscopes, to further their research.

Yesterday, a radiology team from Pitt took the first CT scans of a 300 million-year-old, rock-filled amphibian skull that was found in a roadcut near Pittsburgh International Airport by freshman Adam Striegel during a geology field trip in the spring of 2004.

"This is the first time we've gotten one from the state of Pennsylvania," said Dave Berman, a paleontologist who is studying the specimen. Two other samples of similar age have been discovered in other places.

Mr. Striegel's find is a bit asymmetrical, so the scientists want to know whether the boxier or the flatter side is more normal in appearance. A preparator would have to dig through the specimen's nostril to chip away the rock and expose features within the skull, but that could damage it.

With CT imaging, "you get to see the inside," Dr. Berman said. A first look at the scans suggests the boxy side is more true to form, but more study is needed to be certain, he said.

Even simply talking with scientists in other disciplines can generate new avenues to explore. Dr. Beard pointed to a bone cancer, or osteosarcoma, in a segment of a dinosaur fossil, and noted that medical school Dean Dr. Arthur Levine had just told him that in humans such tumors are more common in men because their bones grow more rapidly.

"Paleontologists today are having a debate about how rapidly dinosaurs grew," Dr. Beard said. More than an oddity, the fossil "might tell us something about how dinosaurs lived 145 million years ago that we could not learn by studying normal dinosaur bones."

First-year medical students who have already taken anatomy can elect to take the mini-course, called the Natural History of Medicine, and some might develop research projects at the museum, said Dr. John Mahoney, the university's assistant dean for medical education.

He said he suspected that initially there might be more eager students than space in the program.

"When I first brought this up, I had students signing up before I had finished the third sentence," said Dr. Mahoney. Then he added wryly, "I am a little bit jealous. When I was a first-year medical student, these opportunities just didn't exist."