Soft Tissues in Fossils

It is a matter of religion that despite their being no blood, no intact soft tissue, no intact nerves, no intact valves, there is, there are. It’s a form of transubstantiation.

Here is what Schweitzer was talking about (and a response regarding the apparent blood vessels to YEC). Thanks

4 Likes

It did not. The trace remains which can only be seen through a high powered microscope are heavily degraded decayed products. The evidence that these remains can survive for millions of years is the fact that T-Rex did not long survive the Chicxulub asteroid strike of 66 million years ago.

If dinosaurs ever disembarked from Noah’s ark, there is no plausible reason that most of them would not be extent today; soft tissue, beating heart, and all.

You owe the discovery of dinosaur soft tissue to Mary Schweitzer. Neither her discovery nor explanation of preservation can be just dismissed as bogus.

5 Likes

You must believe that there is blood, intact blood vessels, intact nerves, intact soft tissue regardless of the evidence, or your faith in Jesus is worthless.

Incidentally here is a link to Mary Schweitzer’s original report in Science in 2005:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7944782_Soft-Tissue_Vessels_and_Cellular_Preservation_in_Tyrannosaurus_rex

4 Likes

There’s one point that’s worth making here.

To be fair to YECs, they aren’t the only ones who misrepresent the soft tissue remnants as consisting of unstable original biomolecules when they do not. It’s sadly all too common for the popular scientific press to make the same mistake. Popular science reports aimed at the layman tend to favour clickbait and sensationalism over rigour and factual accuracy, and they very often operate according to the principle of “never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” And with dinosaur soft tissue, what better story is there than the idea that Jurassic Park might some day become a reality?

This being the case, it is essential to go back to the original peer-reviewed literature in order to find out exactly what scientists have and have not discovered. Unfortunately even then it is all too easy to misunderstand things, especially if you are not all that familiar with the terminology involved or aren’t reading things carefully. For example, “heme molecules” or “heme breakdown products” can all too easily be mistaken for “haemoglobin” because the names sound similar, but they are very different things, and the former is far, far, far, far more stable than the latter. Chemical reactions involving individual components of DNA or proteins can all too easily be mistaken for indicating the presence of DNA or proteins themselves when in actual fact all they reveal is the presence of the breakdown products of DNA or proteins.

This problem is often exacerbated by a tendency in apologetics—especially in YEC apologetics—of approaching scientific reports as an ammunition gathering exercise. When you’re looking for factoids to prove your point, you get all sorts of cognitive biases piling in and the risk of making mistakes, misunderstanding things and quote mining goes through the roof.

For what it’s worth this is a mistake I’ve made myself in the past. When I was at university, I latched onto a remark by one of our lecturers who described cosmology as “the subject where 27\pi^4 is of order one.” I took it to mean that cosmologists didn’t care about accuracy or precision but just tended to hand-wave things, when in actual fact what he was referring to was not accuracy but scale—in cosmology the distances, volumes and timescales you deal with are so massive that the difference between 27\pi^4 and 1 pales into insignificance.

9 Likes

I’ve asked this before and got no response of course: what was the ecology of Earth like 4370 years ago with a hundred million concurrent species with head count and biomass many thousands of times greater than now? What does transubstantiation science say about that? Not that it matters of course as 31% of the US population (aka The Righteous) have no problem believing six impossible things before breakfast. Transubstantiation is the only answer; there were more dimensions. See? You don’t have to have a privileged inheritance and education.

2 Likes

Why isn’t the following mentioned?

Initially, some skeptical scientists suggested that bacterial biofilms (dead bacteria aggregated in a slime) formed what only appear to be blood vessels and bone cells. Recently Schweitzer and coworkers found biochemical evidence for intact fragments of the protein collagen, which is the building block of connective tissue. This is important because collagen is a highly distinctive protein not made by bacteria. (See Schweitzer’s review article in Scientific American [December 2010, pp. 62–69] titled “Blood from Stone.”)

'The point that I am making is this…if Egyptian mummies are found to contain similar biological evidence and they are known to be only thousands of years old, then is seems very logical to conclude that perhaps the Dinasoar bones found containing collagen etc may actually be a lot younger than millions of years old.

It is also interesting that the same studies are suggesting that these dinosaurs were buried quickly.

  • So we have biological matter being found that supports young age,
  • we have quick burial suggesting catastrophic event most likely by drowning
  • the areas where they are often found has findings also suggesting young age
  • the bible claims young age (and we know for a fact that the writing of the biblical text has not been altered in over 2000 years as has been proven by the finding of codex sinaiticus and the Dead Sea scrolls)

is it not quite consistent to argue young age? (I think it is)

wonder what it looks like in a million years :slight_smile: McDonald's Burger Survives 20 Years and Still Looks Fresh off the Grill

4 Likes

Don’t you just love the oxymoron?

2 Likes

How can trace residues, scarcely visible even under high power magnification, and requiring identifification by mass spectroscopy and immunohistochemistry, possibly be considered similar to the ample and life like remains of an Egyptian mummy? There is no comparison. But that does raise the question that if there were dinosaurs before and after the flood, why are no remains in states of far greater preservation? Other animals, thousands of years old, have been found mummified. The answer, of course, is that no dinosaurs have been extent since tens of millions of years ago.

This is what happens when, in good faith, you try to be fair to YEC’s. The miniscule amounts of organic material exist on the edge of detection and identification. Although I am partial that Schweitzer’s findings will largely stand up, there is still contention that contamination, including with regards to collagen, is at play - Cretaceous dinosaur bone contains recent organic material and provides an environment conducive to microbial communities.

Why did you not mention the basis Schweitzer paper instead of quoting the hack AiG article?

Hack AiG article: #3 Soft Tissue in Fossils

Schweitzer paper in regards to collegen: Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein

3 Likes

Oh come on, Adam. If you seriously think that tiny fragments of collagen, no more than a millimetre in size, that had to be soaked in a demineralising solution for a week, are even remotely similar in their state of preservation to Egyptian mummies, consisting as they do of complete carcasses, you must be completely out of touch with reality.

The operative word here is, once again, measurement. I repeat: measurement. We have no measurements that indicate that collagen can not survive in some form or another for hundreds of millions of years. However, it is measurement that pins down and tightly constrains the ages of the fossils concerned. It is measurement that tells us, over and over again through multiple different techniques, that the K/T boundary is 66 million years old and not four and a half thousand.

I’m sorry, but you’re trying to refute measurement with hand-waving here. The scientific term for that kind of shenanigan is “quackery.”

3 Likes

It’s not logical at all. There is no reason to think that mummies represent the upper threshold of preservation for all features.

That doesn’t require a recent flood nor a global flood.

Based on what evidence?

That can happen at any point in history, and it doesn’t require a global flood.

That’s about as vague as it gets.

Your interpretation of the Bible claims a young age, but it is contradicted by mountains of evidence.

6 Likes

No it doesn’t

4 Likes

sorry but why did you pull that out claiming I wrote it? I did not write that it was contained within a quotation on my post from an external resource?

You guys are claiming that science is honest and yet here we have an example of the complete opposite. I did not write what you quoted above. next time amigo, be honest and at least quote in context as what you did is typical of someone who has no research skills or is intentionally unwilling to provide said research just in case it does not support their claim. (I would say in this case it more likely you have nothing of any importance to contribute)

1 Like

Point of order amigo - Klax did not claim you wrote it. Quotes on this forum often show up looking like just part of your post. And to be sure, “intact fragments” is a bit odd.

really and why would that be?

See here’s the thing about Egyptian mummies…we can account for the time period in which they lived very accurately using sources other than humanism and its evolutionary assumptions. We know that any radio dating method must align with the written and oral history concerning them. We can very conclusively say that the science interpretation of age is accurate because of this other written evidence. If you are able to find written historical evidence, surely that would make you feel a whole lot better about the fossil record.

Lets take what Encyclopedia Britnnica has to say about this as an illustration…

The fossil record is incomplete. Of the small proportion of organisms preserved as fossils, only a tiny fraction have been recovered and studied by paleontologists. In some cases the succession of forms over time has been reconstructed in detail. One example is the evolution of the horse. The horse can be traced to an animal the size of a dog having several toes on each foot and teeth appropriate for browsing; this animal, called the dawn horse (genus Hyracotherium ), lived more than 50 million years ago. The most recent form, the modern horse ( Equus ), is much larger in size, is one-toed, and has teeth appropriate for grazing. The transitional forms are well preserved as fossils, as are many other kinds of extinct horses that evolved in different directions and left no living descendants.

I see some very significant statements in the above quotation from Britannica…

Incomplete record
small proportion preserved as fossils
succession of forms has been reconstructed
extinct horses come from dog like creatures and
intentional reconstruction because there are no living descendants of the evolutionary chain (which is obviously mostly hypothesis because its reconstructed)

Christians have a written account that has comprehensively been dated back more than 4000 years. They have a long oral, written, and archeological history with an enormous amount of artifacts that completely support the biblical story. They have the Dead Sea scrolls proving that the Bible hasn’t changed in more than 2000 years (the Isaiah scroll found in the first cave predates the rest by at least 350 years using mainstream science dating methods)…so its almost 2500 years old. They have Codex Sinaiticus…3rd Century AD.

There is lots of very consistent evidence to support the YEC view here…one does not need to attempt to manufacture a dating timeline. You do not need to manufacture an evidence trail of non existent missing animals in the fossil record, there is no need to do any of that. YEC have a sound written history upon which to study the fossil record and make sense of it. The reality is, the YEC studies are remaining consistent with the history of the Bible and that is because they actually have the writings of someone who lived during those times. They have writings from individuals who lived after them, and more after those people and so on all the way down to our current time. The chain of written history is unbroken for thousands of years…we have statements (in the bible) that talk about massive dinosaurs in the book of Job (which Encyclopedia Britannica dates around 600 B.C).

So we have:
the Isaiah scroll proven to be at least 300 B.C. this scroll is almost identical to today’s translations
Dead Sea Scrolls, 2000 years old…almost identical to today’s translations
there is no way modern translations had access to either Sinaiticus, Dead Sea Scrolls or Isaiah scroll during recent history.
Britannica among a huge list of authoritative sources guarentees the gap from Isaiah scroll to the writing of the book of Job is a mere 300 years or less.
The book of Job talks about living Dinasours…or even at a stretch, a very very recent history with them. We know this because the book of job gives a very detailed description of what they looked like and how they behaved.

I think it is, on the balance of probabilities a very reasonable conclusion to make that these very large dinosaurs existed side by side with quite a developed mankind in or around 600 B.C. Even if it was in fact earlier than that, it wasn’t much earlier because these guys don’t appear to have discovered any fossils back then…i am not aware of any writings at least, dating back to that time where men have documented the finding of fossils such that they could write such detail about a couple of the big ones as has been done in the book of Job!

Add this information to the evidence being found in support of soft tissue being found in the T Rex bone, and i have to say, that only adds to my evidence trail. It simply adds more to the balance of probabilities that perhaps the YEC view is correct. People try to throw in curve balls all the time, however, they don’t detract from the consistency of the above information that I’m presenting here. All those curve balls do is provide an avenue of research in order to find out why they might appear to disagree with the evidence we already have from the written record.

My unreserved apologies Adam. No excuse. I am sorry. The words leapt out at me and I didn’t notice that you were quoting.

2 Likes

22 posts were split to a new topic: Job and Dinosaurs

that’s ok…i was being a “bit prickly” and to be honest i shouldn’t have taken issue with it. I should have responded differently.

Also, one of the important things that I’m sure i often forget about discussions is that one very valid part of discussions is the inferences that get made. These inferences, whilst often sarcastic or abusive, or loving, or funny, are a vital part of how we express ourselves. I am the first one to bring out the “well people laugh at Irish jokes” whenever the racism/sexism card is being played…i should have been thick skinned enough to handle this and i wasn’t. Im sorry too.

1 Like