Newest discover of soft-dinosaur bones found (click to enlarge):
Via Creation.com:
The Liscomb bonebed is in the Prince Creek Formation in northern Alaska. A report by a team of scientists who’ve been excavating in this area detailed what they claim is a new type of hadrosaur (duck-billed dinosaur), which they named Ugrunaaluk kuukpikensis. It was called “saurolophine”, meaning a member of the Saurolophine subfamily that includes the genus Saurolophus. The Associated Press immediately published an online article about the paper.1 but curiously, a very important detail was omitted: the bones are not fossilized!
Here is an excerpt from the original paper:
- When the scientists say that the bones are “typically … unpermineralized,” what they mean is that we are not dealing with fossils, but comparatively ‘fresh’ dinosaur bones. The hadrosaurid remains are almost entirely disarticulated, show little evidence of weathering, predation, or trampling, and are typically uncrushed and unpermineralized (Fiorillo et al. 2010; Gangloff and Fiorillo 2010).
Actually, soft bones coming from these areas in Alaska are nothing new… but since the famous T-Rex find, it has become kosher to admit them. See more in my main post on this topic, here.
This is an article from the most recent Creation Matters ([2015] Vol 20, Num 6)… I wanted to share it here as it is short and concise. I included videos where I could whereas the article [obviously] just has printed links:
…without excuse!
Soft tissue has been found in numerous dinosaur fossils. Realistically, this tissue should have decayed long before these fossils were discovered. More significant than this, many tissue specimens have been found to contain measurable radiocarbon (carbon-14), giving ages of tens of thousands of years. This is inconsistent with evolutionary theory, because the rocks in which these fossils have been found are typically said to be at least 65 million years in age. Given the half-life of radioactive carbon, fossils of such great age should be depleted of all traces of carbon-14.
Evolutionary theory thus faces a serious challenge. As might be expected, the responses by the evolutionists to these findings have been swift and heated.
The controversy
In 2006, Mary Schweitzer reported her discovery of still-flexible soft tissue from a reputedly 68-million-year-old T. rex (Schweitzer et al., 2006). Some of the major television networks reported on this discovery in depth, featuring spectacular video recordings, taken through microscopes, showing the structures in vivid color. A sampling of these dramatic video clips taken from a few of these shows is listed below. Space only permits us to briefly describe what the clips reveal.
(Above video) Produced by “60 Minutes,” the TV news program: News correspondent Leslie Stahl interviews Jack Horner and Mary Schweitzer about their soft-tissue findings. This clip shows very impressive video microscopic views of the tissues.
(Above video) Produced by Nova, a television science program sponsored by PBS. the Public Broadcasting Service: News correspondent Peter Standring interviews a number of paleontologists about dinosaur soft tissue. and provides much insight into what has been found.
(Above video) Produced by cable TV network MSNBC: This is an interview with Schweitzer, a week after her 2006 announcement of finding the dinosaur soft tissue. When asked if it was amazing to find soft tissue in a fossil this old, she responded. “It is very amazing. It is utterly shocking, actually, because it flies in the face of everything we understand about how tissues and cells degrade…A lot of our science doesn’t allow for this.”
In recognition of the significance that fossil soft tissue has on the creation-evolution controversy, the Creation Research Society devoted the entire contents of the Spring, 2015 issue of its peer-reviewed journal, CRS Quarterly, to the investigation of this topic. In addition to detailed reports about the CRS’s own WINO research with actual soft dinosaur tissue (Armitage. 2015: Anderson, 2015), this issue presents a thorough discussion of the current arguments for and against this being young, soft tissue.
The Quarterly also contains an excellent article reviewing the current state of radiocarbon dating of dinosaur bones and other materials that are alleged to be millions of years old (Thomas and Nelson, 2015). The specimens cited in this article, which included seven dinosaur samples, dated from about 18,000 to 50,000 radiocarbon years.
(Click to enlarge ~ see more HERE)
Censorship
At an international geophysics conference held in Singapore in 2012, the Paleochronol-ogy Group, an independent, creation-friendly organization, presented their results of carbon-14 dating for several dinosaur specimens. Estimated ages were 22,000 to 39,000 years. Following the conference, the program chairman, in a letter to the researchers, dismissed their results as “obviously an error,” and rescinded the abstract from the conference proceedings. A copy of the letter is reproduced by Fischer (2015).
An article published in Discovery Magazine in 2006 clearly illustrates the hostility shown by evolutionists in response to Schweitzer’s discovery (Yeoman, 2006):
‘The most likely source of these proteins is the once-living cells of the dinosaur,’ she [Schweitzer] wrote in a 1997 paper…That article, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [Schweitzer et al., 1997], sparked a small flurry of headlines… Opponents say, ‘I just don’t believe it.’ She was having a hard time publishing in journals.
Jeffrey Bada, an organic geochemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, cannot imagine soft tissue surviving millions of years. He says the cellular material Schweitzer found must be contamination from outside sources … radiation would have degraded its body. Bada says: “Bones absorb uranium and thorium like crazy. You’ve got an internal dose that will wipe out biomolecules.
She [Schweitzer] acknowledged that one reviewer told her, ‘he didn’t care what the data said; he knew that what I was finding wasn’t possible.’ I wrote back and said, ‘Well, what data would convince you?’ And he said, ‘None.’
The last paragraph of the above quotations was actually removed from the online version of the Discover article. It should be noted that while Schweitzer believes that the soft tissue findings are real, she does not accept the young-age implications.
What it all means
The evidence we have examined points to one conclusion: these tissues are of very recent origin, not one of 65 or more million years. One advantage of all of the hostility by the evolutionists is that despite an intense effort to debunk the findings, they have not been successful at any point. As a result, it is clearer than ever that the tissues are truly of recent origin.
The main argument against these findings at one point was that the soft tissue was comprised of “bacterial slime (biofilm).” That has been shown not to be the case because, among other things, the tissues contain animal collagen, which differs from a collagen-like protein formed by bacteria (Anderson, 2015). More recent efforts to question the data have centered on mechanisms to preserve the tissue for millions of years, including smectite adhesion, apatite sequestration, and iron adhesion, all of which have been shown to be inadequate. The interested reader is referred to the CRS Quarterly special iDINO issue mentioned earlier (see especially Thomas, 2015). Likewise, efforts to debunk the carbon-14 dating results have been unsuccessful (Thomas and Nelson, 2015).
After a while, continuing to deny the obvious becomes futile. The Bible speaks in 2 Peter 3 of mockers who are willfully ignorant of the evidence God has provided concerning the testimony of the great flood in the days of Noah. In Romans 1:18-20, the Bible talks about those who are without excuse for suppressing the truth that the creation reveals a living, personal God. As one considers these Biblical passages, it is amazing how accurately they describe the response of today’s mockers concerning the testimony of dinosaur soft tissue.
References
CRSQ = Creation Research Society Quarterly
Note: All “You Tube” videos were tested and active on November 29, 2015.
Anderson, K 2015. Dinosaur tissue or bacterial bio-films. CRSQ 51(4):259-267.
Armitage, M. 2015. Soft bone material from a brow hom of a Triceratops horridus from Hell Creek Formation, Montana. CRSQ 51(4):248-258.
Fischer, J. 2015. Carbon-14-dated dinosaur bones are less than 40,000 years old. Published by author. Retrieved November 29, 2015, from http://newgeology.us/presentation48.html
Schweitzer, M.H., M. Marshall, K. Carron, et al.1997. Heme compounds in dinosaur trabecu-lar bone, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci USA 94:62916296. Retrieved November 29, 2015, from www.pnas.org/content/94/12/6291.full.pdf
Schweitzer, M.H., J.L. Wittmeyer, and J.R. Homer. 2007. Soft tissue and cellular preservation in vertebrate skeletal elements from the Cretaceous to the present. Proc. R. Soc. B 274:183197. doi:10.1098/rspb.2006.3705. Published online 31 October 2006.
Smith, C. 2014. Dinosaur soft tissue. Creation.com. Retrieved December 3, 2015, from http://creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue (See C. Wieland’s response to the fifth of the readers’ comments.)
Thomas, B. 2015. Original biomaterials in fossils. CRSQ 51(4):234-247.
Thomas, B. and V. Nelson. 2015. Radiocarbon in dinosaur and other fossils. CRSQ 51(4):299311.
Yeoman, B. 2006. Schweitzer’s dangerous discovery. Discover, April 27, 2006. Retrieved November 29, 2015, from http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/dinosaur-dna