18,000,000-year-old muscle tissue....

Ive read several of your Creationist accounts of the soft tissue issue and I must say that you guys are printing as much stuff as the real scientists are on this subject. However, we must remember that all your position is based upon is what I call "the incredulity of ignorance". All the papers Ive read revolve around a single premise, that being:
" HEY, ITS "SOFT TISSUE" SO IT CANT BE OLD ...RIGHT?"

That might be ok for a Weekly Enquirer article but its not really science. Its neither falsifiable, nor testable. Heres an example summary statement

Thats it, If theres any science in that statement, perhaps Ive missed it. All I read is that some Bible Believers wish to make a statement based on nothing but a hopeful worldview.

IF your Creationists were correct, wheres the counter evidence that:

1 Determines that the HELL CREEK formation isnt from the current dates accepted for the Cretaceous?

2 Determines that the T rex (and others) are "young ".

Your Creation guys present nothing but prayers and Bible bunk.


NOW, WHAT ARE REAL SCIENTSIST DOING ?.

Ever since the Hell Creek Trex was found and its mineral encased pliable tissue was found, several lines of investigations have been going on

1.A bunch of Paleontologists have been looking through collections to see whether any other "soft" tissue specimens were on record.AND.... Indeed they were
Ken Carpenter, a research paleontologist from the Denver Museum, in 2007, had published a detailed listing of other specimens where soft tissues (No matter what the form) were detailed. (Carpenter-Journal of Paleontological cience ,JPS.C07.002) He details over 70 different specimens from the US alone.
ALL these specimens have one thing in common. Only a specific and small part of the fossil had shown any preserved soft tissue not the entire animal. It looked like, whatever was the cause , it did not favor the entire specimen but only a small portion . SO, if we could find what this unique geochemical process was, we could maybe understand the special conditions that result in the preservation of soft tissue.

2 Several scientists, including Dr Schweitzer , have come up with a testable and falsifiable theory based upon mineralaogical analyses of several of these soft tissue specimens. Their theory has been based upon the unifying principal that most all of the truly fossilized asoft tissues are actually , ION CENTERED (IRON) POLYMERS.

The polymerization process has been understood in fossilization from such material as amber or the waxy materials in coal deposits, so maybe a kind of polymerization process was in action at the hell creek T rex.
Schweitzers theory is simple and testable

1Fossilization doesnt proceed at a fixed rate for th entire organism. BActeria that cause the organism to decay, also have a big hand in its fossilization.So, while one part of a Trex may be solid rock, another small part may preserve some soft tissue

2As an organism is beginning to ROT in its "death media" the blood serum leaks HEME, (the iron based center of the blood oxygen molecule hemoglobin)

3HEME releases iron ions which form siderite minerals by complewxing with the respiration CO2 from bacteria . Siderite , then will chemically precipitate over the blood vessels and muscle tissue.The precipitation causes Trapping additional heme and serum inside the blood vessels and muscle

4Th heme trapped within the vessels and muscle begins a polymerization process that results in an iron based polymer that remains relatively pliable yet encased within hard rock matrix within the overall specimen.

This is the simple and elegant explanation that Schweitzer and her colleagues have presented and are open sourcing for further testing by other researchers. (Schweitzer ,M. H. et al, 2007. "Soft Tissues and Cell Preservation in Vertebral SKeletal ELements (from the Cretaceous to the present). Proceedings of the Royal ACademy of SCience:BIOLOGY, v 274)

Im gonna go with a more rigorous scientific explanation until you Creationist dudes come up with something more compelling than "Its soft tissue, therefore It cant be old" The science research has resulted in a theory that is


1TESTABLE and

2FALSIFIABLE

Im gonna go with that one.

What I found interesting was that most of the references cited in the story were to previous articles of their own. It's always nice to be able to cite yourself as the source for your own information. They only had two little references to external information. I'll have to check them out.

The number of articles on the soft tissue subject are amazing. The Creationists really feel that theyve got a world beater argument that Schweitzer handed to them. None of the sources Ive read have done ANY research or work on their own, other than looking up words in a Thesaurus rex.

The source articles were fairly interesting, pretty much just reporting their findings.

The Creation Site twisting of the information was very entertaining as usual

Thanks.

wht source articles are you referring? The embedded URLs in gungas link?

Most of the embedded links refer back to their own publication, so they are a joke. But there are two references at the end of the article which refer to other more reputable sources. I had to google them because there are no direct links, but I did find the author's original articles.

The formation of polymer "fossils" of certain internal structures has got a whole new industry leadsing to a search for evidence of degraded DNA . If there are chemical substitutions maybe they can be "decoded" to see what the ancient genome pattern was . I was reading an article in Earth about all that is needed is a biomolecular "Rosetta STone" to help better understand the substitutions.

Heres the Article ferom the British Academy of Science by Schweitzer, Wittmeyer, and Hiorner that describes their study methods. As we notice the "soft" tissue was often encrusted in a crystalline matrix and the matrix was persistent throughout. All specimens had to be "Demineralized" by soaking in EDTA and an unspecified acidic solution (probbly a really dilute soln of Hydroflouric acid).

The concept of polymerization is being looked into in several regional labs . This should provide some new material for our understandings of how stuff can be p[reserved to appear like pliable tissue on one side of the dinosaur but yet, be a total stone fossil in another side.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1685849/

It's amazing that the fossilization process has the potential to retain so much information, even in different chemical forms from the original.

I'm wondering how much fertile ground is still to be uncovered in the realm of Micro-Fossils.

I hope that the field guy are more careful about collecting now that we have these mechanisms defined. We probably wont see such stuff in normal "cast and mold" fossils (usually invertebrates) but ya never know. Im sure theyre gonna be tapping every extremity on bones from Hell Creek.

I saw in Carpenters paper that theyve found blood and blood vessels in
Domeykos fossils. These are fish from the late Jurassic.

Of course, we do have soft tissues in mammoth fossils but those are mostly "freeze dried" and theres no real fossilization (implying chemical replacement or alteration).

The best new fossil hunting areas may be the storage bins in the basements of museums. There must be lots of stuff from the early 1900's that was never analyzed completely.

Thats what Carpenter did for his paper. HE found over 70 new examples of soft tissue coatings or actual vessels in many collections around the US. (Im not sure whether it was an exhaustive search or not).

Science marches on, while Creationism gets trampled into the dust.

The logic surrounding the Carpenter work is that he has found over 70 examples of "soft tissue" preservation (and less than 20 show pliability of some internal organ tissue, and of those , only 3 are not freeze dried mammoths ). If the earth were indeed less than 10000 years old, his thinking was that soft tissue preservation would be a dominant feature.


While this may be a cute turn on the Creationists phrase, I dont like its basic logic because , it too, becomes nothing more than the incredulity of ignorance."If its a young earth, why dont we see more soft tissue"? I much prefer the slow "grind it out" process of Dr Schweitzwer and Horner where they are actually looking for a chemical methodology for which such fossilization could occur.
So far, the co precipitation of siderite and iron centered polymerization seems to be a reasonable explanation. The fact that of the three specimens that show this, all seem to be localized "Laggerstatten facies" ( really finely deposited layers often indicative of quiet oxygen free waters).

I shall watch the literature for more reports and others who try to duplicate Schweitzers latest findings in the lab.


I notice that gunga is somewhat unarmed in this discussion , mostly because his Creationist sources have no real discoveries or scientific analyses to even lay out their young earth model. Everything that they concieve re: soft tissue proving a young earth, is debunked by the mere recognition that the rest of the fossil is hard rock that can be dated by standard radio and stratigraphic methods. In other words, their arguments are self cancelling