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laredo44 wrote: There's nothing there! About a half dozen people all citing each other. Fresh bones and blood citings about as compelling as UFO sightings! Really, nothing available to check, just somebody claiming something

What I actually did was issue a challenge - one which you've conviently ignored. Again, the challenge is this: some folks pulled something out of the rock in Montana. They claim it is a creature of some sort and that it is about 70 odd million years old. They rely on, I am assuming, in part on the theory of evolution. I ask you, what do you think it is, and how old? More importantly, I ask, how do you arrive at your conclusions, assuming you arrive at one at all. I don't think you have any answers, and I challenge you right here and right now to produce some.

Rather than respond to the challenge, you launched into an ad hominem attack on evolution, and all the holes you believe it has. Then you post some silliness full of holes, mis-characterizations, and illogic as if it is to mean something. It doesn't.

Examples?

Let Mary Schweitzer, the scientist most involved

From what I read, Schweitzer is a grad student. This is designed to mislead the reader.

The tissue was colored reddish brown

The presence of tissue is brought in without foundation. All of a sudden, tissue. Poor argument. Unconvincing.

Schweitzer confronted her boss, famous paleontologist 'Dinosaur' Jack Horner

An attempt to bring in a well respected authority to bolster the argument through transferrence. First, Dinosaur Jack doesn't indicate agreement with the assertions. Second, Jack's expertise is paleontology, not DNA or microbiology. Cheap trick to lend credence to a bad argument.

Again, the challenge is to tell how you would determine what the age of this discovery is, not why others are wrong. Can you do it?

howdy laredo44

laredo44 wrote: Rather than respond to the challenge, you launched into an ad hominem attack on evolution, and all the holes you believe it has. Then you post some silliness full of holes, mis-characterizations, and illogic as if it is to mean something. It doesn't.

Examples?

Let Mary Schweitzer, the scientist most involved

From what I read, Schweitzer is a grad student. This is designed to mislead the reader.

I'll try to answer your statements one at a time ok?

This is a little info I found on Ms.Schweitzer from the college website:

"It's one of the best preserved hadrosaur sites around. It's just incredible," Mary Higby Schweitzer said of the Malta site.

Schweitzer is a research associate professor in microbiology and earth sciences at MSU. She is supervising graduate student Melody Bergeron, who is at the Phillips County site. Bergeron will excavate, collect and gather information about the conditions of preservation this summer, Schweitzer said. When she returns to the laboratory in the fall, Bergeron will use molecular and chemical analytical methods, including electron microscopy, to analyze what she found.

http://www.montana.edu/commserv/csnews/nwview.php?article=396

Ancient History

When Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist at Montana State University, speaks at scientific conferences, she sometimes shows her audience how to find DNA from a dinosaur: "Keep your eyes open for one of these," she jokes as she flashes a slide of the ideal specimen-a toy dinosaur embedded in amber.

But it now appears that even if Schweitzer were handed a Velociraptor trapped in a ton of amber, she wouldn't be able to get any DNA. For the past few years, astounding reports in scientific journals (and magazines such as this one) have trumpeted the discovery of ancient genetic material in insects caught in amber millions of years old. But for many researchers, the notion is now pretty much dead. It appears that the fossilized tree resin isn't such a foolproof preservative as once thought. Pretty, yes; but an embalmer of ancient DNA, no. "A lot of the DNA you see in amber is some kind of highly modified ghost," says Richard Thomas, a molecular systematist at the Natural History Museum in London.

Although there were several reports of discoveries of ancient DNA-particularly from amber-in the early 1990s, most subsequent attempts came up with nothing. No one expected getting DNA would be easy, but many researchers would have been more comfortable if these successes had been replicated even once. Recently Thomas and his postdoctoral researcher Jeremy Austin decided they would try to study the evolution of flies by examining specimens trapped in amber. They used a number of insect samples dating back 25 to 40 million years, including some from the same Dominican amber that had been the source of the first reports of successful gene recovery. They never got to study fly evolution-because, as they reported this past year, they could not find any DNA. Trying out many methods for isolating DNA on 15 samples, Thomas and Austin found nothing.

For many researchers the results of this notably rigorous and thorough research was the last straw for ancient DNA. It is such a fragile molecule, they argue, that it can't hold up for more than 100,000 years, even in amber. (The Neanderthal DNA discovered this past year was only between 100,000 and 30,000 years old.) "Either we're all incompetent or it's extremely difficult to make it work," says Thomas. To him, the supposed successes of the past may have been the result of stray DNA from living organisms that drifted through laboratories. Since the common technique for finding ancient DNA involves replicating numerous copies of gene fragments-through a process called the polymerase chain reaction-even a tiny bit of contamination might fool a researcher.

Not everyone agrees with Thomas's gloomy conclusions. "I don't think the book's closed," says Rob DeSalle, a molecular systematist at the American Museum of Natural History who reported finding DNA from a termite trapped in amber in 1992-and who still stands by his claim. "The fact that they're not replicated doesn't invalidate these results." Nevertheless, many labs that were in hot pursuit of ancient DNA, including DeSalle's own team, have dropped the research; DeSalle says the payoff isn't worth the enormous effort. Mary Schweitzer herself tried and failed to get DNA out of a well-preserved fossil of Tyrannosaurus rex. This year, however, she reported her success in isolating blood proteins, which are far sturdier. It's always possible that some similarly encouraging research will emerge in the field of ancient DNA, but for the moment it seems on its way to becoming ancient history. -Ann Gibbons

http://www.discover.com/cover_story/9801-3.html

laredo44 wrote: What I actually did was issue a challenge - one which you've conviently ignored. Again, the challenge is this: some folks pulled something out of the rock in Montana. They claim it is a creature of some sort and that it is about 70 odd million years old. They rely on, I am assuming, in part on the theory of evolution. I ask you, what do you think it is, and how old? More importantly, I ask, how do you arrive at your conclusions, assuming you arrive at one at all. I don't think you have any answers, and I challenge you right here and right now to produce some.

Ok I'm guessing it's a really, really old strange looking dead animal that has been preserved for us to find. :)

Does it look like anything I've seen alive before? No.

Ok then does the Bible describe any type of strange animal that I've never seen? Yes it does.

The Bible's best description of a dinosaur-like animal is recorded in Job chapter 40. "Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox. What strength he has in his loins, what power in the muscles of his belly! His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are close-knit. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like rods of iron. He ranks first among the works of God..."(Job 40:15-19)

The book of Job is very old, probably written around 2,000 years before Jesus was born.

Now how am I going to go about trying to find out the age of this creature? Is the creature 77 million years old or 6,000 or less years old.

Having read the Bible it gives me a genealogy record of how long man has lived on the earth from the time of Adam & Eve to the time of Jesus so I have a timeframe as to how long mankind has been here.

And since they have found man's footprints along with Dinosaur bones I can feel pretty confident that the bones are under 6000 years old.

Which is still a really, really long time if you think about it, because just a little over 100 years ago man was still getting around by horses.

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