So... according to creationists, soft tissue was found in a dinosaur bone?

Question

Posted a few minutes ago:

"In 2004, Post-grad student Mary Schweitzer discovered soft tissue: blood vessels and cells, in a fragment of supposedly 68 million year old T. Rex leg bone. Now a Doctor, Schweitzer now admits, “It was totally shocking,” Schweitzer says. “I didn’t believe it until we’d done it 17 times."

Were the soft tissues soft and pliable originally when found, or were rehydrated in the process of removing the surrounding mineral components of the bone?

How can you demonstrate whether the soft tissues are original tissues? Fossil flexible tissues and nucleated cells have been found before in which the original material was not preserved.

DNA has been recovered from samples much more than 10,000 years old, even more than 300,000 years old (Stokstad, Erik. 2003. Ancient DNA pulled from soil. Science 300: 407).
If dinosaur fossils were as young as evolution deniers claim, wouldn't we have found dinosaur DNA by now?

Answer 1

Yes, it was produced by denaturing minerals with chemicals in a lab. It's more like the cells were mineralized. Anyway, I've corrected the creationist "misinterpretations" (being generous) dozens of times. They continue to repeat them because they don't care. They know they're lying.

Answer 2

Nope. This is one of those creationist misinterpretations that never seems to die, no matter how many times it's corrected. Soft tissue wasn't found in a dinosaur bone - the fossil was demineralized, leaving behind preserved proteins and the highly degraded chemical remains of DNA. Schweitzer's samples were also contaminated with modern bacteria, and were growing a biofilm that made the results unreliable. It's a neat discovery, to be sure, but it's not even close to being evidence for "young" fossils.



Given the choice between "some tissue under certain conditions can be preserved longer than we thought" and "let's re-write all of biology, chemistry, geology, cosmology, and physics so that this one un-reproduced experiment doesn't make us revise what we thought we knew about how tissue is preserved", which one involves the fewest assumptions?

Answer 3

For: dinosaur soft tissue, Google ranks http://rsr.org/soft near the top. Completely documented, Real Science Radio presents the scientific journals reporting, the kinds of biological material found so far, and the dinosaurs yielding up these exciting discoveries.



Scientific Journals: Nature, Science, PNAS, PLoS One, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Bone, the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and others listed in their chronological catalog, "the web's most complete list of dinosaur soft tissue discoveries," as published in many leading journals, according to a co-author of one of those papers.



Biological Material Found: See also, as of April 2014, in fossils from dinosaur-layer and deeper strata, researchers have discovered flexible and transparent blood vessels, red blood cells, many various proteins including the microtubule building block tubulin, collagen, the cytoskeleton component actin, and hemoglobin, bone maintenance osteocyte cells, and powerful evidence for DNA.



Dinosaur and Dinosaur-Layer Creatures: The dinosaurs and other Mesozoic creatures that have yielded their biological material are hadrosaur, titanosaur, ornithomimosaur [ostrich-like dinosaurs], mosasaur, triceratops, Lufengosaurs, T. rex, and Archaeopteryx.

Answer 4

Young or old creationists are ALL liars or grossly misinformed. I'm going with liars.



@Potter: the 6,000 year figure isn't an actual Biblical reference but determined by some preacher measuring through the generations in the Bible.

Answer 5

The quote you give is a false claim, but it is true that what appear to be preserved soft tissues have been found (or at least preserved substances from the breakdown of soft tissues). These require treatment in order to get anything from them though, they are not found as 'soft tissue' as creationist claims tend to imply.

Answer 6

Wasn't it remnants of the extra-cellular bone matrix Schweitzer et al found? You'd think the key words "extra-cellular" would give away the fact that you're not going to find any DNA in it...

Answer 7

The results of Mary Schweitzer have been duplicated by other researchers, and the soft tissue is original.



Scientists have found traces of DNA in dinosaur fossils, as well as measurable amounts of carbon 14.



The evidence is clear that these fossils are not millions of years old.

Answer 8

Mary Schweitzer is APPALLED that the stupid YEC's are hijacking her findings to support their idiocy.



Here's a review by the Smithsonian: skip to page 3 and go down to paragraphs 5 and 6.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dinosaur.html?c=y&page=4



She has also said multiple times in public that her findings have NOTHING to do with YEC lunacy.

Answer 9

The bible was written before the age of enlightenment and thus 6000 years was the best estimate they had at the time. Unfortunately some hardcore Christans refuse to accept this fact.

Answer 10

Soft tissue contains water. Water evaporates very quickly. The claim is false.

Answer 11

Still doesn't prove snakes and reptiles can talk in human spoken language.



At least Harry Potter can speak parsel tongue.

Answer 12

you need to be specific here. There are two types of Creationists, the Young Earth or the Old Earth Creationist? I happen to be an Old Earth dude

Answer 13

17times she found it. I suppose the Illuminati is responsible for suppressing such news.