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Dinosaur Soft Tissue Finally Makes News
by Brian Thomas, M.S. *Although creation-based organizations have reported for over a decade on the technical scientific journal articles published about soft tissue found inside dinosaur remains, mainstream media outlets have largely been silent on the subject. But a recent segment that aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes finally broke the news to a broader audience. The soft tissue issue may be gaining more traction, and even “may be changing the whole dino ballgame,” according to correspondent Lesley Stahl.1
The program is currently viewable online at the CBS website. In a field test demonstration to determine whether a dinosaur fossil was real bone, and not bone replaced by minerals, Stahl touched her tongue to it. It stuck like Velcro. She then asked paleontologist Mary Schweitzer, “This is 80 million years old and it can do that?” “Yes,” Schweitzer said confidently.
In demonstrating that dinosaur bones still somehow contained soft, bendable tissues after all these eons, Schweitzer and her former mentor Jack Horner have been subjected to “one of the biggest controversies paleontology has seen in years.”1
This resulted from Schweitzer’s unexpected discovery in 2000 of “elastic, like living tissue” from inside the femur of a recently excavated Tyrannosaurus fossil nicknamed “B. rex.” 60 Minutes reported, “It looked like the soft tissue she would have expected to find if it had been modern bone. This was impossible. This bone was 68 million years old!” The report replayed some of the original video of the tissues taken in 2000. “They were there. Things that looked suspiciously like flexible, transparent blood vessels.”1
Stahl stated that “being a fossil, there should have been nothing left. But there was.” Thus, “blood vessels, and even what seemed to be intact cells, pose a radical challenge to the existing rules of science?that organic material can’t possibly survive even a million years, let alone 68 million.”1
But it is not some arbitrary “rule of science” that dictates that flesh usually rots quickly. It is extremely well established by common observation, as well as by decades of easily repeatable experiments, such as those measuring protein decay that occurs in mere days.2 Instead, the “science” being challenged is perhaps the deep-time evolutionary dogma that remains widely held despite contradictory evidence.3
When Schweitzer’s work was originally published in the journal Science, it was greeted with more than just skepticism.4 Her laboratory was suspected of accidentally contaminating the samples, or worse. But her original findings were firmly established when her team—after taking great pains to prevent contamination or spoiling of specimens from the field to the lab—found even more soft dinosaur tissue, this time in another species, that was verified by a third party.5
Viewing “80-million-year-old” hadrosaur tissue through a microscope, Stahl asked, “Is that a blood vessel?” Schweitzer replied, “This is a blood vessel. Do you see the branches right there? And look at all of them.”1 But even with the evidence in front of their eyes, and despite their own incredulity, the two still accepted the story that organic remnants that should have rotted long ago had somehow been preserved for longer than many current species have supposedly existed on earth.
By removing the unscientific interpretive filter of “millions of years” placed on it, the conundrum created by this soft evidence evaporates. If these dinosaurs were buried during a recent and major watery catastrophe, then the discovery of their still-soft tissues is much easier to explain.6
Mummified Dinosaur Skin Looks Young
by Brian Thomas, M.S. *The remains of a dinosaur found in the Hell Creek Formation of North Dakota are so well preserved that some scientists are just “gobsmacked.”
The mummified remains belong to a hadrosaur nicknamed “Dakota” and were the subject of a recent study that appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.1 About the size of a hippo, the dinosaur is supposedly 66 million years old. But its skin says otherwise, a find that paleontologist and the study’s co-author Phil Manning called “absolutely gobsmacking.”2
Like many other young-looking dinosaur remains,3,4,5,6 this specimen was “extremely well preserved” and contained “soft-tissue replacement structures and associated organic compounds.” Using various advanced techniques, the researchers established the “survival and presence of macromolecules.”1 They were even able to compare the dinosaur’s skin structure with that of living creatures, finding that it is similar to the two-layered structure of modern birds and reptiles.
What is “gobsmacking” about this find is that given the millions of years this dinosaur has supposedly been dead, these soft tissue structures should absolutely not be there anymore. What is known empirically about Dakota, Leonardo,4 “B. rex,” and other dinosaur remains is that they contain organic molecules, including either intact or partially-decayed proteins from the original dinosaur.
The very presence of such materials counters the “millions of years” assigned to them. Nonetheless, scientists have tried to support long-age interpretations by inventing special caveats. This time, “the power of sediments” was hailed as a magical preservative of the tissues.8
But Dakota shows no signs of being 66 million years old, or even one million years old. The most logical explanation for the presence of preserved organic skin molecules is that these remains are from a creature that died relatively recently. Biblical data not only provides the timeframe for its demise in Flood deposits a few thousand years ago, but also a mode of deposition in agreement with what the study’s authors described as a dinosaur that “fell into a watery grave.”
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