Evolution on Trial

April 25, 2005 Volume 1, Number 4

Modern Dinosaur?
In the beginning
God created the
Heaven and the
On March 24, 2005 a very exciting article was released to the news media. It was a
Earth…..
type of article that should have gotten everyone thinking. An article that defies all logic
and common sense. This article reported that soft tissue and even red blood cells had
been preserved in a 70 million year old T-Rex bone. You read correctly, soft tissue that
was still supple and pliable enough to snap back like a rubber band and they want us to
To subscribe to believe that it’s 70 million years old.
this newsletter
please send an The following are snippets from the actual article about this find by Dr. Mary
email to the Schweitzer, of North Carolina State University.
following address:
Paleontologists have recovered what appear to be soft tissues from the
E-mail: thighbone of a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex
creation@bairdclan.com
exposing blood vessels, bone cells and possibly intact blood cells with nuclei.

We’re on the Web! "The tissues are still soft, transparent and flexible, and we can manipulate the
vessels with our probe," said team leader Mary Schweitzer
www.evolutionontrial.com

http://www.all4hisglory.org/
The translucent vessels were so elastic that when one was stretched out and then
released, it snapped back like a rubber band.

Since the bone looked relatively unfossilized, researchers, using weak acid, dissolved the
mineral from a piece of the dinosaur bone (much the same way as the common science class
exercise where chicken leg bones are soaked in vinegar for a week to make them rubbery). In
fresh bones, the acid removes the hard mineral, leaving only organic material such as fibrous
connective tissue, blood vessels and various cells. By comparison, if one were to demineralize
a typical well-permineralized fossil, there would be nothing left. The acid-treated T. rex bone
fragment, however, produced a flexible and elastic structure similar to what you would get from
a fresh bone.
A: The arrow points to a tissue fragment that is still elastic. It beggars belief that elastic tissue
like this could have lasted for 65 million years.
B: Another instance of “fresh appearance” which similarly makes it hard to believe in the
“millions of years”.
C: Regions of bone showing where the fibrous structure is still present, compared to most fossil
bones, which lack this structure. But these bones are claimed to be 65 million years old, yet
they manage to retain this structure.

Just looking at the above pictures, would you interpret these as belonging to a specimen of 70-
million years old? Just forget what you have been taught to believe and think logically. Would
soft tissue survive for 70-million years? Evolutionists would tell you that sure it’s possible. They
even say that examples of soft tissue in fossils have been found before and that this is nothing
new. But again this is a gross misrepresentation of the truth. I looked into these claims and
here is what I found.

Brooks Hanson, a deputy editor of Science, noted that there are few examples of soft tissues,
except for leaves or petrified wood, that are preserved as fossils, just as there are few
discoveries of insects in amber or humans and mammoths in peat or ice. Leaves and petrified
wood and nowhere are there an age prescribed to these specimens.

Next, Conventional wisdom among paleontologists states that when dinosaurs died and
became fossilized, soft tissues didn’t preserve – the bones were essentially transformed into
“rocks” through a gradual replacement of all organic material by minerals.

Then finally I ran across an article about the chances of soft tissue preservation. According to
Matt Carrano, curator of Dinosauria at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History,
typically minerals completely replace all the "original" materials or structures in a dead animal,
in order to create a fossil, retaining only the shape; even soft tissue preservation tends to be
limited to skin impressions or other such secondary forms.

So the claim by some that this is just an everyday occurrence is nonsense. The experts all
agree, that this is not something we should be seeing. Would you be surprised if this wasn’t the
first time this sort of thing has been found? Apparently it isn’t.

Schweitzer then duplicated her findings with at least three other well-preserved dinosaur
specimens, one 80-million-year-old hadrosaur and two 65-million-year-old tyrannosaurs. All of
these specimens preserved vessels, cell-like structures, or flexible matrix that resembled bone
collagen from modern specimens.

Also holding true to actual scientific investigation we have to be honest. Current theories about
fossil preservation hold that organic molecules should not preserve beyond 100,000 years.

The truly sad part about all of this is the fact that even with all of this information coming from
the experts in the field who are not creationist, but who are simply doing their job, evolutionists
are still questioning the results. These particular people are not writing or publishing their
findings for either creationists or evolutionists. Yet evolutionists are still arguing that this doesn’t
for one instance point to either a young earth or a recent dinosaur.
Am I going to claim that this proves that the earth is 6,000 years old? NO!! This finding doesn’t
state that. What it does show us though is that the framework that evolutionary science is trying
to establish is faulty. Every evolutionist that I present these findings to say the same thing,
“PROVE that soft tissue cannot have survived for 70 million years.” I stand by the following
statement…. Current theories about fossil preservation hold that organic molecules should not
preserve beyond 100,000 years. These aren’t my theories. These are the current theories
behind fossilization and bone preservation. Schweitzer says, “We may not really know as much
about how fossils are preserved as we think.”

During one of my many debates, a challenge was issued that since I didn’t believe that this
dinosaur could be old and that I was using the information about this recent find to further the
study of creation and a young earth model, that he would email Dr. Schweitzer and get her
opinion. The following is her response, which I find very odd. See for yourself.

no. i am very comfortable with the age of dinosaurs. we know a lot more
about how the earth ages than about how molecules and tissues degrade.
there is a lot more work to do in that area...

but yes, i realize that this will be used by some to favor their cause.
just remember, i have not yet determined WHAT the material is, so at this
point, there isn't a lot to say.

Mary Higby Schweitzer, Ph.D

Dept. of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

The part that I find odd is that she states that she has not yet determined WHAT the material is,
so at this point, there isn’t a lot to say. Well she sure seemed confidant what the material was
when she published the report in Nature magazine and sent all the press releases out to the
major media.

Now all of a sudden we aren’t sure what it is. HOGWASH. If she wasn’t sure what the material
was then she wouldn’t have compared it to 3 other well preserved specimens with the same
condition. Also several years ago she did the same thing. A partially unfossilzed T-Rex
skeleton was discovered in Montana and they found red blood cells in it. Very exciting since
this was the first time this sort of thing had been found. About a year later a statement was
issued saying that they weren’t sure what they were looking at, but do to the age of the
specimen it couldn’t be blood cells. Yet here we are again. It’s the same song and dance.

When Schweitzer first found what appeared to be blood cells in a T. Rex specimen, she said,
“It was exactly like looking at a slice of modern bone. But, of course, I couldn’t believe it. I said
to the lab technician: “The bones, after all, are 65 million years old. How could blood cells
survive that long?

The evolutionists that I have approached with this information are squirming. They are not
admitting defeat, but instead resort to an approach of slander and then say prove that it can’t
happen. There is no way to prove that this tissue isn’t 70-million years old, but common sense
says it can’t and the even the experts don’t know how it could have happened.

Unfortunately, the long-age paradigm is so dominant that facts alone will not readily overturn it.
As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out, what generally happens when a
discovery contradicts a paradigm is that the paradigm is not discarded but modified, usually by
making secondary assumptions, to accommodate the new evidence.

So will this new evidence cause anyone to stand up and say there’s something funny about the
emperor’s clothes? Not likely. Instead, it will almost certainly become an “accepted”
phenomenon that even “stretchy” soft tissues must be somehow capable of surviving for
millions of years. (Because, after all, we “know” that this specimen is “70 million years old”.)
See how it works?
Facts are facts…the evidence points to a recent dinosaur that conforms to scripture of ALL
land animals being represented on the ark, and yes that includes dinosaurs.

Written by:

Steven Baird

Author of “Another Road to Damascus: A Journey from Evolution to Creation”

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