The most
widely known and publicized find of a soft tissue find has been that
of Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist who discovered what appeared to
be tissue matter preserved within the leg bone of a Tyrannosaurus
Rex. Later, a scientist was fired for making known his discovery of
organic matter within fossils belonging to a triceratops because he believed
that the presence of organic matter was evidence of an extinction that took
place thousands, not millions of years ago; a belief by which the University he
worked for felt threatened. [1]
Young
Earth Creationists have long been citing reports of discoveries within the
fossil record that they insist are inconsistent with old earth doctrine
including the presence of organic properties found within fossilized remains [2, 3]
since all organic material was expected to have lasted no more than perhaps a
few million years at best, but now, evolutionists have begun to admit that the
presence of soft tissue remains of various sorts are more common place than
previously believed. In their coverage of the latest research regarding
the soft tissue finds by Mary Schweitzer, according to Fox News, the
Tyrannosaurus leg bone in which the blood cells had been discovered was not the
only fossil in which Schweitzer's team of researchers discovered the remains of
organic matter:
The
researchers also analyzed other fossils for the presence of soft tissue and
found it was present in about half of their samples going back to the Jurassic
period...[4]
The
reason as to why soft tissue presence had not been known until recently was that
before Schweitzer's discovery, there was no reason to look for something within
a fossil that was not expected to be there:
The
problem is, for 300 years, we thought, “Well, the organics are all gone,
so why should we look for something that's not going to be there?”...[5]
Nature Communications also has cited numerous
examples of reported discoveries of soft tissue found in prehistoric fossils:
The presence of vertebrate soft tissue has long
been recognized and documented in exceptionally preserved fossils.
Recent research has suggested that original
components of soft tissues such as skin, feathers and other integumentary
structures, and muscle fibers may be preserved in these exceptional
fossils. For example, still-soft flexible material was recovered after
demineralization of well-preserved bones from late Cretaceous dinosaur
Tyrannosaurus whereas proteinaceous material was found to be preserved in
another dinosaur, Brachylophosaurus. Haemoglobin fragments were found in
the abdomen of a beautifully preserved Eocene misquito, and degraded eumelanin
was recovered in the integument of an Eocene turtle.
Models proposed to account for such preservation
indicate that it should be the exception rather than the rule. In
particular, it has long been accepted that protein molecules decay in
relatively short periods of time and cannot be preserved for longer than 4
million years. Therefore, even in cases where organic material is
preserved, it is generally accepted that only parts of the original protein are
preserved...[6]
But the
research team who analyzed the organic material found in the different fossil
samples reported in the Nature Communications article did not
describe the fossils as being exceptionally preserved:
Here, we examined...different dinosaur bones
from the Cretaceous period, none of which are exceptionally preserved. We
used electron microscopy and a focused ion beam (FIB), as part of a novel
method to prepare samples for mass spectrometry...with a scanning electron
microscope (SEM) we observed, in four different samples, structures resembling
calcified collagen fibers from modern bone; in three other samples, structures
enriched in carbon, and in two of our samples, structures that resemble
erythrocytes from birds. [7]
It seems
that perhaps the presence of organic material within fossils may turn out to be
the rule rather than the exception as Creation Ministries International
(CMI) also points out in stating that the information "that there are
abundant amounts of soft tissue in creatures supposedly millions of years old
is spiraling out of control.” [8]
The
responses to the soft tissue discoveries that evolutionists have attempted to
provide are far from convincing. Even the proposed theory of iron acting
as a preservative to explain the presence of the organic matter in fossils does
not stand up to honest scientific or logical scrutiny; more information on this
can be found in a previous post.
If
evolutionists have been hiding this knowledge that challenges their long held
and precious doctrine, what else are they hiding from the public at
large? Another ramification to be considered is that where organic matter
is found, there is also carbon which would pose inescapable problems for the
radiometric dating methods upon which evolutionists have long relied to support
their doctrine.
If
someone were to test the tissue samples for carbon and attempt to date the
fossils by dating the organic matter with the carbon dating method, the dates
given by the carbon dating method would be far different from the dates given
by the radiometric dating methods. Which one could evolutionists rely on
then? Perhaps neither one. The dates from both methods would both
be wrong for several reasons.
End
Notes:
1.
"Lawsuit: CSUN Scientist Fired After Soft Tissue Found On Dinosaur
Fossil," CBS-Los Angeles, July, 24, 2014
2.
Brian Thomas, Ph.D, "Still Soft after Half a Billion Years?"
Institute For Creation Research, May 5, 2014
3.
Brian Thomas, Ph.D, "Bloody Mosquito Fossil Supports Recent
Creation,"
Institute
For Creation Research, October 25, 2013
4.
Mark Hollis Armitage and Kevin Lee Anderson, "Soft sheets of fibrillar
bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops
horridus," Science Direct; Acta Histochemica, Vol. 115, Issue 6, Pages
603-608, July, 2013
5.
Live Science, "T. Rex flesh? Controversial soft tissue finally
explained," Fox News, November 27, 2013
6.
Sergio Bertazzo, Susannah C. R. Maidment, Charalambos Kallepitis, Sarah Fearn,
Molly M. Stevens & Hai-nan Xie, "Fibers and cellular structures
preserved in 75 million-year-old dinosaur specimens," Nature
Communications 6, Article Number: 7352 (2015)
7.
Ibid
8.
Calvin Smith, "Dinosaur soft tissue," Creation Ministries
International, January 28, 2014
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