Dinosaur Shocker (YEC say dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years)

Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.”

After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen.

It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors. “The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded—or both.

Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

It may be that Schweitzer’s unorthodox approach to paleontology can be traced to her roundabout career path. Growing up in Helena, Montana, she went through a phase when, like many kids, she was fascinated by dinosaurs. In fact, at age 5 she announced she was going to be a paleontologist. But first she got a college degree in communicative disorders, married, had three children and briefly taught remedial biology to high schoolers. In 1989, a dozen years after she graduated from college, she sat in on a class at Montana State University taught by paleontologist Jack Horner, of the Museum of the Rockies, now an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. The lectures reignited her passion for dinosaurs. Soon after, she talked her way into a volunteer position in Horner’s lab and began to pursue a doctorate in paleontology.

She initially thought she would study how the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones differs depending on how much the animal weighs. But then came the incident with the red spots.

AdvertisementIn 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”

Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”

What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says. If particles of that one dinosaur were able to hang around for 65 million years, maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.

Schweitzer tends to be self-deprecating, claiming to be hopeless at computers, lab work and talking to strangers. But colleagues admire her, saying she’s determined and hard-working and has mastered a number of complex laboratory techniques that are beyond the skills of most paleontologists. And asking unusual questions took a lot of nerve. “If you point her in a direction and say, don’t go that way, she’s the kind of person who’ll say, Why?—and she goes and tests it herself,” says Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University. Schweitzer takes risks, says Karen Chin, a University of Colorado paleontologist. “It could be a big payoff or it could just be kind of a ho-hum research project.”

In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from the Museum of the Rockies, was eating his lunch in a remote Montana canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. That bone turned out to be part of what may be the best preserved T. rex in the world. Over the next three summers, workers chipped away at the dinosaur, gradually removing it from the cliff face. They called it B. rex in Harmon’s honor and nicknamed it Bob. In 2001, they encased a section of the dinosaur and the surrounding dirt in plaster to protect it. The package weighed more than 2,000 pounds, which turned out to be just above their helicopter’s capacity, so they split it in half. One of B. rex’s leg bones was broken into two big pieces and several fragments—just what Schweitzer needed for her micro-scale explorations.

It turned out Bob had been misnamed. “It’s a girl and she’s pregnant,” Schweitzer recalls telling her lab technician when she looked at the fragments. On the hollow inside surface of the femur, Schweitzer had found scraps of bone that gave a surprising amount of information about the dinosaur that made them. Bones may seem as steady as stone, but they’re actually constantly in flux. Pregnant women use calcium from their bones to build the skeleton of a developing fetus. Before female birds start to lay eggs, they form a calcium-rich structure called medullary bone on the inside of their leg and other bones; they draw on it during the breeding season to make eggshells. Schweitzer had studied birds, so she knew about medullary bone, and that’s what she figured she was seeing in that T. rex specimen.

Most paleontologists now agree that birds are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. In fact, they say that birds are dinosaurs—colorful, incredibly diverse, cute little feathered dinosaurs. The theropod of the Jurassic forests lives on in the goldfinch visiting the backyard feeder, the toucans of the tropics and the ostriches loping across the African savanna.

To understand her dinosaur bone, Schweitzer turned to two of the most primitive living birds: ostriches and emus. In the summer of 2004, she asked several ostrich breeders for female bones. A farmer called, months later. “Y’all still need that lady ostrich?” The dead bird had been in the farmer’s backhoe bucket for several days in the North Carolina heat. Schweitzer and two colleagues collected a leg from the fragrant carcass and drove it back to Raleigh.

AdvertisementAs far as anyone can tell, Schweitzer was right: Bob the dinosaur really did have a store of medullary bone when she died. A paper published in Science last June presents microscope pictures of medullary bone from ostrich and emu side by side with dinosaur bone, showing near-identical features.

In the course of testing a B. rex bone fragment further, Schweitzer asked her lab technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, to put it in weak acid, which slowly dissolves bone, including fossilized bone—but not soft tissues. One Friday night in January 2004, Wittmeyer was in the lab as usual. She took out a fossil chip that had been in the acid for three days and put it under the microscope to take a picture. “[The chip] was curved so much, I couldn’t get it in focus,” Wittmeyer recalls. She used forceps to flatten it. “My forceps kind of sunk into it, made a little indentation and it curled back up. I was like, stop it!” Finally, through her irritation, she realized what she had: a fragment of dinosaur soft tissue left behind when the mineral bone around it had dissolved. Suddenly Schweitzer and Wittmeyer were dealing with something no one else had ever seen. For a couple of weeks, Wittmeyer said, it was like Christmas every day.

In the lab, Wittmeyer now takes out a dish with six compartments, each holding a little brown dab of tissue in clear liquid, and puts it under the microscope lens. Inside each specimen is a fine network of almost-clear branching vessels—the tissue of a female Tyrannosaurus rex that strode through the forests 68 million years ago, preparing to lay eggs. Close up, the blood vessels from that T. rex and her ostrich cousins look remarkably alike. Inside the dinosaur vessels are things Schweitzer diplomatically calls “round microstructures” in the journal article, out of an abundance of scientific caution, but they are red and round, and she and other scientists suspect that they are red blood cells.

Of course, what everyone wants to know is whether DNA might be lurking in that tissue. Wittmeyer, from much experience with the press since the discovery, calls this “the awful question”—whether Schweitzer’s work is paving the road to a real-life version of science fiction’s Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs were regenerated from DNA preserved in amber. But DNA, which carries the genetic script for an animal, is a very fragile molecule. It’s also ridiculously hard to study because it is so easily contaminated with modern biological material, such as microbes or skin cells, while buried or after being dug up. Instead, Schweitzer has been testing her dinosaur tissue samples for proteins, which are a bit hardier and more readily distinguished from contaminants. Specifically, she’s been looking for collagen, elastin and hemoglobin. Collagen makes up much of the bone scaffolding, elastin is wrapped around blood vessels and hemoglobin carries oxygen inside red blood cells.

Because the chemical makeup of proteins changes through evolution, scientists can study protein sequences to learn more about how dinosaurs evolved. And because proteins do all the work in the body, studying them could someday help scientists understand dinosaur physiology—how their muscles and blood vessels worked, for example.

Proteins are much too tiny to pick out with a microscope. To look for them, Schweitzer uses antibodies, immune system molecules that recognize and bind to specific sections of proteins. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have been using antibodies to chicken collagen, cow elastin and ostrich hemoglobin to search for similar molecules in the dinosaur tissue. At an October 2005 paleontology conference, Schweitzer presented preliminary evidence that she has detected real dinosaur proteins in her specimens.

Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”

young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “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.”

This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”

By definition, there is a lot that scientists don’t know, because the whole point of science is to explore the unknown. By being clear that scientists haven’t explained everything, Schweitzer leaves room for other explanations. “I think that we’re always wise to leave certain doors open,” she says.

But schweitzer’s interest in the long-term preservation of molecules and cells does have an otherworldly dimension: she’s collaborating with NASA scientists on the search for evidence of possible past life on Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan, and other heavenly bodies. (Scientists announced this spring, for instance, that Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus appears to have liquid water, a probable precondition for life.)

Astrobiology is one of the wackier branches of biology, dealing in life that might or might not exist and might or might not take any recognizable form. “For almost everybody who works on NASA stuff, they are just in hog heaven, working on astrobiology questions,” Schweitzer says. Her NASA research involves using antibodies to probe for signs of life in unexpected places. “For me, it’s the means to an end. I really want to know about my dinosaurs.”

AdvertisementTo that purpose, Schweitzer, with Wittmeyer, spends hours in front of microscopes in dark rooms. To a fourth-generation Montanan, even the relatively laid-back Raleigh area is a big city. She reminisces wistfully about scouting for field sites on horseback in Montana. “Paleontology by microscope is not that fun,” she says. “I’d much rather be out tromping around.”

“My eyeballs are just absolutely fried,” Schweitzer says after hours of gazing through the microscope’s eyepieces at glowing vessels and blobs. You could call it the price she pays for not being typical.

I am unable to accept the famed "Man Tracks" in the Paluxy limestone near glen Rose, TX, (because I know who carved them, and I have run my fingers over his chisel marks).

I think even Glen J. Kuban, who has probably spent more time investigating these tracks than just about anybody else, and who does not accept the tracks as human, would not buy the assertions that these tracks were carved, that you know the person that carved them, and that you have run your fingers over the chisel marks:

"The Taylor Site contains a long trail of deeply impressed dinosaur tracks, and several shallower trails, four of which have been claimed by many creationists to be human: the Giant Run Trail, the Turnage Trail, the Taylor Trail, and the Ryals Trail (which includes a large hole reported to be the spot from which a human track was removed many years ago). Many of these alleged "man tracks" were fairly shallow and more or less oblong in shape, and did not match the shape of any dinosaur tracks known to the Taylor crew. Some of the these tracks did vaguely resemble human footprints, however, many of the tracks also showed problematic (non-human) features (discussed further below). This site has received more acclaim than other "man track" sites for the following reasons: 1) The elongated tracks on this site are numerous and occur in clear right-left sequences; 2) At least some of these tracks were excavated from under previously undisturbed strata, precluding the possibility that they are carvings or erosion marks; 3) Many of them show "mud push-ups" and other features confirming that they are real tracks and not erosion marks or carvings; 4) Several of the "man tracks" were reported to show clear human toe marks when first uncovered[4] (although no published photographs have ever shown this); and 5) Three of the alleged human trails (Taylor, Turnage, and Giant Run) intersect the trail of deep and distinct dinosaur tracks, providing clear evidence that the elongated tracks and the deep dinosaur tracks were made at approximately the same time."
http://paleo.cc/paluxy/tsite.htm"

Cordially,

Ichneumon, Ichneumon...I have skimmed over the lengthy post #76 that you referred to in one of your previous posts. No doubt, it seems impressive, and I freely concede that I do not have the background in these fields of study, not to mention the sheer time it would take, to explore all of the citations, articles, ad nauseum that you list there.
However, it is not necessary for me to go on a fruitless quest to understand the minute details of everything that evolutionists allege in their papers and articles. That would be a tremendous waste of time and energy. The crux of the matter is that it still boils down to some basic questions that must be dealt with up front.
Setting the philosophical questions aside, the two biggest problems for the evolutionists are the absence of transitional fossil forms and the blind-faith assertion that macroevolution has occurred.

I really don't know whether to laugh or cry. I suppose this is way too long for "this is your brain on creationism"....

the two biggest problems for the evolutionists are the absence of transitional fossil forms and the blind-faith assertion that macroevolution has occurred.

I'll deal with the transitionals, as you included no information at all on them.

This will involve posting the "skulls" photograph that Mamzelle hates so much, so don't tell her, OK?

Now, the claim that there are no transitionals completely ignores the folks in this photograph. Except for #A, a modern chimp, the rest follow along in a fairly nice progression--which is laid out in the chart which follows the photograph.

Now, which of these are transitionals? Why, all of them! Every population (as evolution works on populations, not individuals) is transitional between ancestors and descendants. The small differences can build up over time into bigger differences.

Look at the similarities between #A (a modern chimp) and #B (Australopithecus). You can also see some differences.

These differences can also be seen in various other traits in the photograph. For example, note from #B to about #G and H the reduction in alveolar prognathism (the forward projection of the lower face). Note also the increase in brain size from #C to #I.

Now, you have see with your own eyes that there are intermediate steps in the process of changing from #B, a very chimp-like early ancestor to #N, modern humans. These intermediate steps can be called transitionals.

OK, skip to the bottom for closing comments.

Source: http://wwwrses.anu.edu.au/environment/eePages/eeDating/HumanEvol_info.html

Of course I do not expect you to accept this, because it would obviously go against your already-decided religious beliefs.

But it is disingenuous for you to be entering into the various fields of science with a large stop sign, saying,

STOP! You idiots don't know nothin', I'll tell you how it really was!

based on your religious belief rather than on any scientific evidence.

No doubt, it seems impressive, and I freely concede that I do not have the background in these fields of study, not to mention the sheer time it would take, to explore all of the citations, articles, ad nauseum that you list there. . .

Setting the philosophical questions aside, the two biggest problems for the evolutionists are the absence of transitional fossil forms and the blind-faith assertion that macroevolution has occurred.

Let me get this straight. You admit that you don't have the background or the time to study the evidence for the theory of evolution, and then you say that although you aren't qualified to analyze it and you don't know what the evidence is you know that we don't have evidence?? Talk about blind faith!

We have fossil transitional species and we have genetic evidence that "macroevolution" has occurred, and we have observed mechanisms that allow this. Unfortunately as long as you're getting your information from YEC propaganda you will remain perpetually ignorant of this.

Fossil Record Overview - Missing Transitional Forms
A severe problem for evolutionists is the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record. By transitional forms, we mean intermediate forms of life appearing in the fossil record that are "in-between" existing types of organisms found today or in the past.
If slow, gradual evolution occurred, you would expect to observe a continuum of change in the fossil record. After all, if life took millions of years to arrive at its' present state of development, the earth should be filled with fossils that could be easily assembled into a number of series showing minor changes as species were evolving.

The opposite is true - no continuum! When fossils are examined they form records of existing and extinct organisms with clearly defined gaps, or missing transitional forms, consistent with a creationist's view of origins. Below are some of the gaps in the fossil record.

Consider...

The Cambrian explosion - At the bottom of the geological column in the so called Cambrian rocks are found highly complex creatures: trilobites, worms, sponges, jellyfish, etc., all without ancestors. It's as though you "turned the light on" in the fossil record. These are highly complex life forms appearing on the scene without forerunners. Trilobites for example, have compound lenses in their eyes that make use of Fermat's principle and Abbe's Sine Law. This is like entering the highway of life without an entrance ramp.

Insects - When found in the fossil record, they are already developed without ancestors. Dragonflies are dragonflies, cockroaches are cockroaches. Instead of an evolutionary tree, we have only the leaves without the trunk or branches. To compound this problem the question of flight arises... when did they develop the ability to fly? There are no fossil intermediates in the record.

Invertebrates and vertebrates - Transitional forms leading to vertebrates are absent even though the transition supposedly took millions of years. It is theorized that life passed through a stage where a creature possessed a simple rod-like notochord. This has not been found.

Fish to Amphibian - Fin to feet... Evolutionist glibly cite a Fish --> Amphibian --> Reptile --> Mammal progression in their theory, however there is a large gap in the fossil record between fish and amphibians. Among other differences, fish have small pelvic bones that are embedded in muscle and not connected to the backbone unlike tetrapod amphibians which have large pelvises that are firmly connected to the vertebral column. Without this anatomy, the amphibian could not walk. The morphological differences in this gap are obvious and profound.

Amphibian to Reptile -The skeletons of amphibians and reptiles are closely related which makes this an ambiguous case.

Mammals - Mammals just appear in the fossil record, again without transitional forms (Gish notes 32 such orders of mammals).
Marine Mammals - whales, dolphins, and sea cows also appear abruptly. It has been suggested that the ancestors of the dolphins are cattle, pigs, or buffaloes.

Also consider the enigma of flight - supposedly, insects, birds, mammals (bats), and reptiles, each evolved the ability to fly separately. In each of the four cases there are no series of transitional forms to support this assertion.

The primates - lemurs, monkeys, apes and man appear fully formed in the fossil record. The proverbial "missing link" between man and ape remains elusive and periodically changes with the thinking of the day.

And finally, dinosaurs. Again there is the absence of transitional series leading to these giants.

The most often cited "example" of a transitional form is the Archaeopteryx which has been touted as a reptile to bird transition. However, this creature is controversial and enveloped in dispute.

Sometimes evolutionists suggest that the transitional forms haven't been found because there has not been enough fossils unearthed to accurately portray life as it existed long ago. However, since Darwin's time there has been a hundred-fold increase in the number of fossils found and a systematic problem still remains. There are fewer candidates for transitional forms between major divisions of life than for minor divisions, the exact reverse of what is expected by evolutionary theory.

In summary, instead of getting a phylogenetic "tree" in the fossil record, you get vertical patterns indicative of creation, conflicting with the notions of gradual evolution and supporting the creationist position.

You don't even seem to have read what I wrote in #1066, above. It looks like you just hustled over to your favorite creation website and pulled the first seemingly relevant page you could find. Oh, here is the URL, which you forgot to include:

http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/fossils.htm

You also forgot to include "Updated: 10/4/95" which appears at the bottom of the page. Really on top of things over there, eh?

But, that OK. I'll play the game.

The first two paragraphs of this site read:

A severe problem for evolutionists is the absence of transitional forms in the fossil record. By transitional forms, we mean intermediate forms of life appearing in the fossil record that are "in-between" existing types of organisms found today or in the past.
If slow, gradual evolution occurred, you would expect to observe a continuum of change in the fossil record. After all, if life took millions of years to arrive at its' present state of development, the earth should be filled with fossils that could be easily assembled into a number of series showing minor changes as species were evolving.

This is why I figure you didn't actually read my post. If you had, you would have seen with your own eyes just what these paragraphs claim couldn't and didn't happen.

Go back to post #1066 and really look at the various skulls, and you will see for yourself the gradual changes (transitionals) which your creationist websites say dodn't exist.

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