Dinosaurs from chickens??

Bone is not the most porous stuff in the world, but it IS porous. The idea of anything like this surviving inside bone for 70,000,000 years is a total joke; it would have to have never rained in Montana or the Dakotas in all that time.

Those are the actual pictures Wol. What they dont show is that the "soft tissue" is covered with a liquid like preservative and the colors havebeen enhanced a bit for microscopy. All that photo data is shown under a 20X lens .

The T rex specimen from Hell Creek was ACID ETCHED from its encasing matrix. The original material was shown in NAture a few years ago The matrix and material surrounding the "soft tissue" was actually rock. I believe they did etching with a modified HF solution to dissolve any silica.

Perhaps one of the most exciting recent discoveries for creationists has been the report of soft tissue found in a dinosaur fossil.1,2 In 2005, a study in the prestigious journal Science documented the presence of unfossilized tissue from a T. rex.3 Since these dinosaurs are supposed to have been extinct for at least 65 million years, finding soft tissue was quite a surprise for evolutionists. The soft tissue was only partially mineralized; after the minerals were removed, the tissue was “stretchy” and had the appearance of blood vessels.
The finding of unfossilized dinosaur tissue is a serious blow to the idea of an earth millions of years old, but it is not the only example. Recently, scientists have also obtained bone marrow that could contain DNA from fossil frogs and salamanders that were supposed to be 10 million years old.4

Conventional wisdom held that proteins and DNA could not survive for millions of years. Indeed, an upper limit to the preservation of a stable protein such as collagen was presumed to be about 2.7 million years at 0°C, 180,000 years at 10°C, and only 15,000 years at 20°C.5 Thus, there was much skepticism that what Schweitzer found was really dinosaur soft tissue when it was initially reported. Secular scientists were hesitant to believe that such tissue and proteins could persist for more than 65 million years.
Now for what’s new

The newest development regarding this dinosaur concerns this week’s announcement that what was found in this T. rex fossil supposedly presents strong evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Here is the background.

Dr. Schweitzer has reported that the protein collagen has been recovered from her T. rex soft tissue specimen.6,7 The pair of papers are very careful and cautious studies making use of some sophisticated experiments. These findings provide confirmation that the material is in fact dinosaur soft tissue.

Researchers used several different techniques to identify the presence of collagen. First, they found that antibodies to collagen would bind to the samples, and this binding did not occur after treatment with enzymes that specifically degrade collagen. Second, they used mass spectrometry to determine the amino acid sequence of the protein. They then mapped various protein fragments and compared them against a database of protein sequences from a variety of organisms.

Of all the organisms in the sequence database, the one that matched T. rex the closest was the chicken. Now, before assuming that this would be strong evidence that birds are related to dinosaurs, it must be put into perspective. The sequence similarity between the T. rex and the chicken was 58%, while it was only 51% similar to both frogs and newts. This compares with a reported 81% similarity between humans and frogs, and 97% between humans and cows.7 Moreover, while some of the peptide fragments showed sequence matches to chickens, others matched frog, or newt, or even fish and mice. The authors did point out that not all organisms are in the database. Although the chicken was the closest match from the database, it is possible that animals not included could be a closer match. Regardless, such similarity does not prove that the organisms shared an evolutionary ancestor.

Certainly the recovery of protein sequences from fossil dinosaurs should be applauded—and that work is solid. However, the use of such sequence data to support the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs is a stretch.8

Left: The flexible branching structures in the T. rex bone were justifiably identified as “blood vessels”. Soft tissues like blood vessels should not be there if the bones were 65 million years old.
Right: These microscopic structures were able to be squeezed out of some of the blood vessels, and can be seen to “look like cells” as the researchers said. So once again there is scope for Dr Schweitzer to ask the same question, “How could these cells last for 65 million years?”

Damn those bugs and bats and pterodactyls. How can they fly without feathers?

Gunga has just shown it is impossible for any of them to fly. We should believe him and not our lying eyes.

AIG's take on the topic:

I said absolutely nothing about flying insects or bats. Birds are totally different from those and the manner in which birds achieve flight is totally different. Bats and flying insects are totally irrelevant to the question of whether or not flying birds could plausibly evolve.

Bats and insects for that matter appear in the fossil record out of the blue with no plausible antecedants.

Thus "true birds with teeth" such as archeopteryx or sinornithes are good models of derivative structures since they show the relationships of the teeth sizes and dentition with earlier archosaurians.

The basic impossibility of a dinosaur evolving into a bird can be seen from several angles.

A flying bird requires a baker's dozen or so very specialized systems which do not exist in other animals of any sort: a light bone structure; wings; flight feathers (totally unlike down feathers or any othe rform of insulation); the system for turning flight feathers (they open and close like venetian blinds on upstrokes and downstrokes); hivo flow-through lungs; super efficient hearts; beaks (since hands will not be available for feeding; specialized balance parameters; specialized tail for controlling flight etc. etc.

Any one of these things would be worse than useless, i.e. anti-functional, until the day the entire thing came together.

Thus, if a small dinosaur were to magically evolve one of these features against all odds then, by the time another ten thousand generations rolled around and he evolved the second, the first having been antifunctional all the while would have DE-EVOLVED and either become vestigial or turned into something else.

Your arguments aren't compelling at all. They're based on ignorance and attack a strawman version of Evolution, and frankly, my opinion of your scientific knowledge (based on the things you post) is so low, I didn't expect anything more from you.

For example, if I was to mutate PAX3 at locus 2q35 it will affect eye, nose and facial development.

Once again, spendius makes a facetious comment saturated with complete disdain for science.

Honestly, you should stop visiting this forum if you're going to keep scoffing at honest attempts to correct someone on their misconceptions.