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Dinosaur Shocker (YEC say dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years)
Smithsonian Magazine ^ | May 1, 2006 | Helen Fields

Posted on 05/01/2006 8:29:14 AM PDT by SirLinksalot

Dinosaur Shocker

By Helen Fields

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.


TOPICS: Heated Discussion
KEYWORDS: crevolist; dinosaur; dinosaurs; evolution; godsgravesglyphs; maryschweitzer; paleontology; shocker
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To: mlc9852

What makes you think I don't believe in God?

That BS makes me livid. A belief in God does not necessitate the suspension of thinking which YEC'ers exhibit. Faith and science are quite capable of co-existing inside a normal, thinking mind.


241 posted on 05/01/2006 12:23:55 PM PDT by 2nsdammit (By definition it's hard to get suicide bombers with experience.)
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Comment #242 Removed by Moderator

To: Diamond

I already said as much.


243 posted on 05/01/2006 12:27:28 PM PDT by Liberal Classic (No better friend, no worse enemy. Semper Fi.)
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Comment #244 Removed by Moderator

To: DaveLoneRanger
The snot count on that one was actually a little low. The sardonic irony, however, was spiked...

So you've given up on bothering to make substantive replies, I see... Your little riff could be equally applied to anything you chose to bicker with, but failed to have anything of real value to say about.

By the way, I'm sorry I couldn't get back with your large response to me on the Ann Coulter thread. I intended to respond, but such large responses take a little time, and by the time I got to it, the mod had been urinated off by the thread, and locked it. Shame. A couple of other comments I wasn't able to respond to as well.

Yeah, that froze a lot of people in mid-conversation. I was wanting to respond to some posts there myself.

245 posted on 05/01/2006 12:28:43 PM PDT by Ichneumon (Ignorance is curable, but the afflicted has to want to be cured.)
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To: Elsie
Now if this same personage, who does things in an instant; how LONG would it take Him to CREATE all that we find around us???

How long did it take him to "create" a St. Bernard and a French Poodle out of the same original dog ancestor?
How long did it take him to create bi-color corn out of the original corn plant?

If mankind can breed different varieties of animals and plants - why do you not think Nature can do the same thing?

And why would you not believe all of this has been conceived and planned by God?

Here's a couple more Biblical quotes for you:

And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
2:11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 2:12 And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
2:13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
2:14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

Explain to me how one river can be split 4-ways and end up in both Assyria and in Ethiopia when they are on 2 different continents??

3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.

"one of us"?? Just who was God speaking to? What does he mean by "one of US"?

4:16 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. 4:17 And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.

Where did Cain's wife come from? The Bible says that Eve bore Cain and then Abel - it doesn't say anything about her bearing anyone else. So just where did Cain's wife come from? Was she Cain's sister? If so, why does the Bible not mention her?

If you are going to say "just because Genesis doesn't say so - Eve had other children" then I say to you "just because Genesis doesn't say that God created evolution - he did."

If you want to start "interpreting" the Bible and say "well, what it really means is....", then why would YOUR interpretation be any more valid than mine or anyone elses?

246 posted on 05/01/2006 12:29:41 PM PDT by Tokra (I think I'll retire to Bedlam.)
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To: js1138

What kind of question is that? What is your definition of "valid"? Do you mean do I believe every religion in the world? I am not acquainted with a lot of "religions" so I can't give you an answer. Do you accept all religions as valid?


247 posted on 05/01/2006 12:30:16 PM PDT by mlc9852
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To: mlc9852

Aha!!! "I actually don't know what ID says." Then why do you defend it?


248 posted on 05/01/2006 12:30:16 PM PDT by 2nsdammit (By definition it's hard to get suicide bombers with experience.)
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To: 2nsdammit

I'm not a YEC so that doesn't mean anything to me. I guess I should have asked if you believed the Bible was the authoritative word of God.


249 posted on 05/01/2006 12:32:30 PM PDT by mlc9852
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To: mlc9852

Do you attend any church? Have you professed any faith?


250 posted on 05/01/2006 12:33:10 PM PDT by js1138 (somewhere, some time ago, something happened, but whatever it was, wasn't evolution)
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To: 2nsdammit

I don't defend ID - I defend that God is the creator. Simple as that.


251 posted on 05/01/2006 12:35:00 PM PDT by mlc9852
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To: Virginia-American

The look on his face is insufficiently horrified!


252 posted on 05/01/2006 12:35:12 PM PDT by ahayes (Yes, I have a devious plot. No, you may not know what it is.)
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To: DaveLoneRanger; ahayes; hawkaw
Perhaps not quite what you're looking for, but this was another find that caused a "revolution" of rethinking about evolution.

No it didn't.

That seems to happen an awful lot.

No, it doesn't. Not in the way you're trying to imply.

Dinosaur Found in Mammal's Belly

Interesting, but not the kind of "challenge" to evolution you're trying to spin it as. You and the rest of the evolutin-haters have *really* got to learn the difference between "rethinking" the history of specific lineages, and "rethinking" evolution itself.

It's like the difference between having to reconsider the path that a bullet took through a badly decomposed body being studied in a murder investigation, versus having to "rethink" the laws of physics.

This was Hawkaw's point, but it zoomed right over your head.

You anti-evolutionists keep taking examples similar to the former and trying to wave them around as if they were the latter. In most cases, it's due to gross ignorance of the field you're attempting to "critique" (most anti-evolutionists don't know squat about biology, or how science is done), but in many cases it's just outright dishonesty and willful propaganda.

Which is it in your case?

You may want to be careful about admitting the things that will cause reconsideration of evolution. You just might find them.

And you may want to be careful about understanding a topic before you make any more goofy misstatements about it.

253 posted on 05/01/2006 12:36:17 PM PDT by Ichneumon (Ignorance is curable, but the afflicted has to want to be cured.)
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To: js1138

Yes and yes.


254 posted on 05/01/2006 12:37:25 PM PDT by mlc9852
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To: Rhadaghast

Deluded? Perhaps. Or perhaps just speaking metaphorically.


255 posted on 05/01/2006 12:38:35 PM PDT by 2nsdammit (By definition it's hard to get suicide bombers with experience.)
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To: GourmetDan
Me: And there never will be. Because *anything* is compatable with a "created biology". That's one of the reasons it's not science - there's no way to test it.

You: And the *exact* *same* *thing* goes for evolution, in case you are inadvertantly being selective in your criticism.

Pay attention to this thread. There are no fossils of people and dinosaurs together. According to evolutionary theory, there never will be any. According to creationism or ID, there might or might not be.

256 posted on 05/01/2006 12:41:03 PM PDT by Virginia-American
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To: 2nsdammit
ID'ers/YECs - show me just ONE example of a fossil of a modern human in the same sedimentary rock layer as a dinosaur, OR IN AN EARLIER LAYER, and I will admit you are right.

image hosting by http://imgup.com/

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link

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When Jerry McDonald, a back-to-school geology student, first arrived at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and gazed across the Mesilla Valley at the Robledo Mountains, he had no idea how many days of scorching heat he would soon be spending in their rocky arroyos
. The Robledos have always been a fossil hunter's paradise, but it wasn't long before MacDonald became convinced that in the excitement of finding Permian fossils, the greatest secret of the Robledos had been overlooked.

Many collectors had found an occasional fossil footprint - a track. But what if an entire trackway - a series of footprints - could be uncovered? The scintific knowledge that can be gleaned from a trackway discovered in place is infinitely more valuable than a random footprint on a rock which may have been washed down an arroyo and deposited millions of years out of geologic context.

MacDonald tenaciously found and uncovered not just one, but hundreds of trackways.
Then came the quest for vindication by the nation's leading museums, the web of political intrigue which wrapped around government agencies and local naysayers, and the inevitable cries of "fraud".

In the end, the MacDonald trackway discovery was recognized by the Smithsonian and Carnegie museums as the most significant Permian discovery in North America, yielding voluminous data about the creatures that lived along the then tropical shores of the great Southwest ocean 50 million years before dinosaurs roamed the land.

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257 posted on 05/01/2006 12:42:09 PM PDT by Diamond
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To: jec41
GD wrote: The fact that putrescin is still present is evidence that these fossils *aren't* 'millions of years old', not evidence that there is some unknown condition that would preserve putrescin for 'millions of years'.

Actually it can be tested, is being tested, and will continue to be tested. Its as simple as taking a air sample, examining the matter that the oder is from and determining whether the odor is from the material of a cadaver or something other. Then you might question and explain the odor.

I see that you are very confused. It's not as simple as testing for the presence of putrescin. It is as impossible as burying a dead animal, waiting 68 million years to dig it up and *then* test for putrescin.

With reasoning skills like that, I can see why you think evolution is 'true'.

Sheesh.

258 posted on 05/01/2006 12:42:17 PM PDT by GourmetDan
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To: mlc9852

But being openminded, above all else, you accept the fact that other religions, whether you have studied them or not, have equal claims for truth.


259 posted on 05/01/2006 12:43:28 PM PDT by js1138 (somewhere, some time ago, something happened, but whatever it was, wasn't evolution)
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To: trashcanbred
Why does an apple fall to the ground? Hmmm... must be an intelligent being pushing (or pulling... the debate continues) us down.

Nope, God dropped it, Hmmmm, no he can't do that, god doesn't have accidents. However I don't care, nothing else would explain it.

260 posted on 05/01/2006 12:43:59 PM PDT by jec41 (Screaming Eagle)
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