Soft tissue found in dinosaur bones undercuts evolutionary timetable

When Mary Schweitzer found soft tissue in dinosaur bone in 2005, her boss got mad.

“Dammit, Mary, the creationists are going to love you,” Jack Horner snapped, according to what she wrote for Biologos.

Indeed, Schweitzer discovery threatened to upset the evolutionary biologists’ timeline for the world because soft tissue decays relatively quickly. If she found soft tissue in bones from a Tyrannosaurus rex perhaps it wasn’t 58 million years old, as the geologists argued. Maybe it was just a few thousand years old – trapped by sediment in a catastrophic worldwide flood and fossilized.

Mary Schweitzer with Jack Horner at a dig site

Smithsonian called her discovery a “shocker;” LiveScience, “contorversial;” and Discovery magazine, “dangerous.” News show 60 Minutes said it “posed a radical challenge to the existing rules of science.”

Young earth creationists, who argue that earth’s history reaches about 10,000 years, cackled with satisfaction.

“I invite the reader to step back and contemplate the obvious,” wrote Carl Wieland on the Answers in Genesis website. “This discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most.”

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For its part, Creation praised Schweitzer’s research as “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.

Since her initial discovery, Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, has found red blood cells, blood vessels, bone cells and even hemoglobin and collagen. A supposedly 80-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur bone has also yielded soft tissue.

The Christian Science Monitor reported this January that scientists found collagen, a protein basic to animal tissue, in an allegedly 195-million-year-old fossil of a Lufengosaurus dinosaur in China.

Proteins are complex molecules which break down quickly and can’t survive for a millennia.
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But Schweitzer, a conservative evangelical Christian who adheres to evolutionary theory, floated the theory in 2013 that iron may have preserved the soft tissue much like formaldehyde. If shown to be true, her theory would take wind out of the sails of the young earth Christians.

Schweitzer got her start in paleontology after studying molecular biology. She audited a course with famed paleontologist Jack Horner, the scientist who is trying to create dinosaurs in modern times from chicken DNA. Horner consulted for the movie Jurassic Park.

Schweitzer was thrilled with the course, worked her way through her doctoral degree and began lab work under Horner.

Through three summers of digging , Horner unearthed a T. Rex skeleton from an escarpment in northeastern Montana known as Hell’s Creek. Because of the remoteness and rugged terrain, the bones had to be helicoptered out but were too heavy, so the team reluctantly broke one of the leg bones into two pieces.

Horner handed some of the resulting fragments to Schweitzer to analyze. The first thing she realized was the dinosaur had been a pregnant mother because of the presence of medullary bone, which is a calcium overproduction to supply the eggs. (Originally, the fossil had been nicknamed “Bob.”)

But the real astonishment came when Schweitzer’s team dissolved some fragments in weak acid, a practice that was never done before because it dissolves bone matter. The lab assistant had only tried to eliminate the outer crust on the bone but wound up disintegrating all the hardened minerals.

When Schweitzer looked at the only remaining chunk under the microscope, she couldn’t believe its elasticity. It took her quite some time to realize that it was soft tissue, which had never before been seen by a scientist. Read the rest of the story about soft tissue dinosaur bones.

‘Impossible fossils’ puncture evolution

The Alvis Delk Cretaceous Footprint

A handprint, a finger, a footprint and a hammer are part of a smattering of “impossible fossils” – so called because they upend the evolutionary timetable and puncture the theory of evolution.

A handprint in limestone from the Cretaceous Era – 110 million years ago – was found near Weatherford, Texas, in the 1970s. It is on display at the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas. Either human-like creatures were on earth much earlier than thought, or the dating methods are flawed and the earth is much younger than most scientists will admit.

From the Cretaceous Era by dating methods — long before man was believed to be alive.

A fossilized human finger also from the Cretaceous Era was found also in the 1970s in the Commanche Peak Limestone formation in Texas and is on display at the Creation Evidence Museum. The fact that flesh has been fossilized (normally only bones make it through millennia as fossils) could result from instant entombment in mud (from a huge flood, for example).

The London hammer

A footprint – known as the Burdick Track – was found again in Cretaceous limestone in the Cross Branch stratum, a tributary to the Paluxy River in Glen Rose, Texas.

Staunch evolutionists have worked vigorously to poke holes in the credibility of these discoveries – with good reason, because they poke holes in the theory of evolution. The extent to which they defend a pet theory in spite of discrediting discoveries reveals a lack of scientific integrity, many believe.

Ken Ham debates Bill Nye the Science Guy about evolution in 2014

“These amazing fossilized imprints/remains have left the scientific community scratching their heads,” said Mihai Andrei on ZME Science, himself no creationist.

Another footprint – called the Alvis Delk Cretaceous Footprint – is even more intriguing because it is intersected by the footprint of an Acrocanthosaurus dinosaur print. This suggests that dinosaurs and man walked the Earth at the same time. The infrequency of such intersections in fossils makes sense: humans tried to stay away from the fearsome animals. Read the rest of the fascinating story.