Soft Tissue from Dinosaurs Found

This appears to falsify, in one dramatic swoop, the claim that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Why don't the scientists admit it? It's uncanny how all the reports treat the 70 million figure like an unquestionable fact, despite the clear implications of this discovery. Notice how the BBC treats the date like dogma:

Quote:

In the hotly contested field of dino research, the work will be greeted with acclaim and disbelief in equal measure.

What seems certain is that some fairly remarkable conditions must [sic] have existed at the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago.

Seems certain to whom? No to people with their heads screwed on, who have refused to take the oath of loyalty to the Darwin Party, or signed onto the Committee to Protect the Geologic Column at All Costs. We'll have to see if the NCSE censors this paper, preventing teachers from showing it to their students, to protect their sensitive minds from anxiety when they compare it with their textbooks.

. Making the excuse that the process of fossilization is not well understood is pitiful, and imagining these Montana sediments escaping millions of years of mountain uplift, erosion and climate change is a big stretch. Though airtight amber sometimes preserves all the details of an insect, it is incredibly improbable that soft, pliable tissues from a large dinosaur could be preserved in a sedimentary matrix for 10,000 years, let alone 70 million. Somebody ought to press the point. The BBC explains why: "Normally when an animal dies, worms and bugs will quickly eat up anything that is soft. Then, as the remaining bone material gets buried deeper and deeper in the mud, it gets heated, crushed and replaced by minerals, turning it to stone." Schweitzer said in the NG coverage that "our theories of how fossils are preserved don't allow for this [soft-tissue preservation]." The pathetic response of some scientists, upon hearing this announcement, is that the soft tissue recovery might help them construct better phylogenetic trees. They seem oblivious to the fact that the data threaten to cut off the long-age limb they are sitting on.

Here is an opportunity for young-earth creationists to make a strong case. It's easier to prove an upper limit than a lower limit: e.g., that under the best of conditions, cells or blood vessels could not be older than a lower limit based on lab observations, rather than to claim they could last millions of years, because no observer could keep records on such time scales. Someone should also apply carbon dating to the tissues and see if any C-14 is present. It would be below the detection threshhold if the bone is as old as claimed. Watch the efforts to find out if DNA is still present, which "cannot survive that long" according to Derek Briggs in the News@Nature article. There's a prediction that can be tested. This find is making it easier to believe that dinosaurs actually lived in relatively recent times and were buried quickly by a watery catastrophe just as a Biblical chronology indicates.

Dramatic as this announcement is, it is not the first. Creationists have followed up on soft-tissue claims for years. In 1994, Buddy Davis and team endured danger and hardship recovering hadrosaur bones in Alaska that contained unfossilized tissue; their story is published in The Great Alaskan Dinosaur Adventure:

http://shop4.gospelcom.net/epages/AIGUS.storefront/en/product/10-2-085

There was an announcement in 10/15/2002 about mummified dinosaur remains:

http://creationsafaris.com/crev1002.htm#dino40

and even more remarkable, mummified soft parts in a crustacean claimed to be 511 million years old - over seven times older on the evolutionary scale (see 07/20/2001 entry):

http://creationsafaris.com/crev07.htm#fossil24

That such announcements are rare in the secular literature does not mean that the fossils are rare; Jack Horner said in the NG article that other dinosaurs are "probably similarly preserved," but workers in the field are usually reluctant to damage dinosaur bones to look inside (maybe partly because they don't expect to find soft tissue after millions of years.) What this story illustrates how scientists tend to find what they expect to find, look for what they need to find, and ask the questions prompted by their worldview. It's instructive to notice who was surprised by today's announcement.