DINOSAUR FLESH SURVIVES ‘80 MILLION YEARS’
Thursday 28 May, 2009
World
Science/Nature
A Hadrosaur
By Andrew Halloway
Four years ago scientists found the well-preserved soft tissue of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a fossil, and they couldn’t believe it was true. Now flesh has been found of another dinosaur – in even older rocks – that again challenges the vast ages of geological time necessary for evolution to stand a chance of having happened.
The T Rex flesh, including blood vessels and red blood cells, was found inside a fossilised thigh bone estimated to be 70 million years old. The amazing fossil, buried in 1,000 cubic metres of sandstone in Montana, USA, was reported in the mainstream science journal Nature. It astonished the scientist who found it: Montana State University’s Dr Mary Schweitzer, who said: “This is certainly not something I ever dreamed I’d see.”
Why the shock? Because flesh is not supposed to be able to avoid decay for 70 million years! We all know how quickly scavengers can strip a carcass after which micro-organisms break down the rest. Even hard bones are replaced by minerals in the fossilisation process.
The report admitted that the scientists “still don’t know how this dinosaur tissue has remained preserved for so long.”
But since that T Rex discovery, soft tissue has been found in another T Rex as well as several other dinosaur specimens. Even the bones of an Iguanodon allegedly twice as old, dated around 120 million years, contained enough of the protein osteocalcin to produce an immune reaction.
Yet fragile, complex organic molecules like proteins, even if hermetically sealed, should fall apart all by themselves, in far less than 70 million years. So, unable to believe their eyes, critics began to claim that the samples must have been contaminated with later organic material, or that the flesh wasn’t really flesh at all.
The latest find is the flesh of a hadrosaur – a duck-billed dinosaur that in evolutionary theory should be 80 million years old. Its significance lies in the fact that, in order to prove once and for all that what is being found is organic tissue, it has been more rigorously tested than any previous specimen. And the results confirm that this really is ‘flesh and blood’.
Many evolutionists felt all this controversy had been swept under the carpet when, just last year, scientists claimed to have found evidence that the organic material was not original dinosaur flesh. The transparent blood vessels, for example, were thought to be a modern bacterial formation called ‘endocasts’ that just happened to fill the gaps where the original vessels lay. As for the red blood cells, it was believed that they were actually iron-rich spheres called ‘framboids’.
But the scientist who discovered the original T Rex fossils, Mary Schweitzer, and many other scientists, were not convinced by these explanations. Hence, when she found the Hadrosaur flesh with “the same fibrous matrix, transparent, flexible vessels, and preserved microstructures she had seen in the T Rex sample,” she was determined to demonstrate the truth.
Schweitzer and her team carried out additional protein sequencing, were meticulous about avoiding contamination, and ensured they got confirmation from other laboratories. Announcing her results in the leading journal Science, Schweitzer said: “These data not only build upon what we got from the T Rex, but take the research even further.” That’s because they found even more types of preserved organic material, including collagen.
Sadly, even Schweitzer herself, who claims to be an evangelical Christian, is not prepared to accept the obvious conclusion from these finds – that all the fossils and flesh are far younger than evolutionary estimates. But to admit that the ‘millions of years’ dating systems might be vastly overestimating the age of rocks and fossils is too much for evolutionists to bear. It would destroy evolution, which is inconceivable without hundreds of millions of years within which to work – quite apart from all the other problems with the theory.
As creationist Dr Carl Wieland explains, evolution so blinds scientists to an objective analysis that they will now try to prove that organic tissue can survive for millions of years. They would rather attempt that than accept the “most straightforward fit to the evidence… that the time of burial of these dinosaurs was not millions of years ago at all, but only thousands of years ago at most.
“As the evidence continues to mount that dinosaur fossils do indeed contain well-preserved soft tissue structures and identifiable proteins, the assumption that will increasingly be made is that ‘we now know that such tissue components can last that long, after all.’”
Wieland explains the faulty evolutionist line of reasoning:
- “We know that this dinosaur fossil is 80 million years old.
- “Calculations based on operational (observational) science indicate that no collagen should survive anywhere near that long.
- “Collagen has been identified in these dinosaur fossils. Therefore:
- “There must be a mistaken assumption in the calculations mentioned in Point 2. Though we don’t know for sure how, collagen must be able to survive for 80 million years. How do we know that? Because…
- “We know that this dinosaur fossil is 80 million years old.
“Notice how points 1 and 5 are identical, revealing the circularity. The following chain of reasoning is far more science-based:
- “This dinosaur fossil is claimed to be 80 million years old.
- “Calculations based on operational (observational) science indicate that no collagen should survive anywhere near that long.
- “Collagen has been identified in these dinosaur fossils. Therefore:
- “The claim in point 1 is wrong. The fossil cannot be anywhere near that old.”
And there are plenty of other sound, logical reasons to doubt the accuracy of the radioactive dating techniques used by modern science, which rest on several unprovable assumptions. So whether the days of Creation described in the Bible were literally 24-hour days or are symbolic of longer periods of time known only to the Creator, it seems that the age of life on this planet should be measured in thousands of years – not millions.
And perhaps man really did walk with the dinosaurs. We find in many civilizations that the mention of huge beasts is prevalent in their ancient literature, although they were known as something else: dragons, Behemoth, sea serpents, Leviathan etc. There are many stories in ancient history which claim to be eyewitness accounts of meetings with these creatures, but today they are dismissed as fairy tales. What if they were not fairy tales at all, but instead evidence of what we now know as dinosaurs?
Read the Bible’s own account of two massive creatures that could well be dinosaurs. See Job chapter 40 verses 15-24 and chapter 41 verses 1-34.
Photo: Heinrich Harder © N/A (Public Domain)
Alex Woods. wrote:
When human footprints were found preserved in stone alongside dinosaur tracks in Paluxy the evolutionists promptly claimed it was a hoax. When bulldozers uncovered more tracks in front of them they claimed they could not be human the toenails were too long. Seeing scissors or clippers had not been invented then isn’t that what you would expect? Somehow once you are stuck in a belief system it is hard to change. The unlearning process is much more difficult that picking up beliefs in the first place.
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