Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. It weighed 8 kg (18 pounds). There were multiple ice ages over millions of years. By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you're agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. The stretchy material, which Despite very good reasons to believe that collagen could survive for tens of millions of years in the matrix of dinosaur bones, some in the scientific community have questioned the soft-tissue finds.2 They claim these materials resulted from bacterial contamination of the fossils with microbially derived structures, thus creating a false appearance of blood vessels and cells. But this claim is based on experiments that are unrepresentative of the conditions under which these dinosaur remains were preserved. Schweitzer is set to search for more dinosaur soft tissue this summer. And it doesnt explain wholly soft, pliable tissue. It works by linking up, or cross-linking, the amino acids that make up proteins, which makes those proteins more resistant to decay. They've even found chemical reactions consistent with the presence of DNA, though Schweitzer is quick to note that she hasn't proven DNA is really present. These regions are the most protected within the collagen fiber. So to determine the age of sedimentary rock layers, researchers first have to find neighboring layers of Earth that include igneous rock, such as volcanic ash. Eventually, some of the blocks can fall away, leaving a smaller, more stable structure. 2009: protein (collagen) fragments were isolated from a 80 million year old (geologic time scale) hadrosaur fossil. Draw the Dinosaur's Face. Part of HuffPost Science. Its interesting to note that scientists are exploring the second alternative, but not the first one! You can't predict when a specific unstable atom, or parent, will decay into a stable atom, or daughter. Rare 95-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Skull Uncovered in Australia. These layers are like bookends -- they give a beginning and an end to the period of time when the sedimentary rock formed. Looking at a nearly 150-million-year-old tibia of the large predator Allosaurus fragilis from Utah, the trio found a layer of bone in which the tissue was disorganized and replete with traces of blood vessels, suggesting it had grown quickly. Draw the Dinosaur's Face. Mark Armitage participated in a dig at the Hell Creek Formation, in Montana, a world-famous dinosaur graveyard. Both of these ages are assigned according to the geological time scale. In many cases, they are one and the same.. Photograph A shows the demineralized fragment is flexible and resilient and when stretched (arrow) returns to its original shape. Thomas T, 2019, Does the Toast Model explain fossil protein persistence?, Institute for Creation Research. "Determining the Age of Rocks and Fossils." In short, he argues that because we know that fossil fuels, coalified wood and invertebrate fossils are tens or hundreds of millions of years old, whats the problem with accepting dinosaur soft tissue being that old as well? Scientists have had two decades to think about soft tissue preservation in dinosaur bones. One (Biblical) is based on recorded history in the Bible and the other (Uniformitarian) is based on assuming that the present (processes today) is the key to the past (ancient processes) and on the hypothetical geologic time scale. The most recent ice age ended about 10k years ago. Since then, the claim of discovering soft tissues in an ancient fossil has been disputed by some molecular biologists. The resemblances between the skulls of Diamantinasaurus and the similarly aged Sarmientosaurus from southern South America are pretty striking.. Schweitzer was the first researcher to identify and isolate soft tissues (such as collagen, a connective protein) from an ancient fossil bone (Appendix A). Based at North Carolina State University, Schweitzer is currently researching Molecular Paleontology, molecular diagenesis and taphonomy, evolution of physiological and reproductive strategies in dinosaurs and their bird descendants, and astrobiology. The element's half-life is the amount of time it takes for half the parent atoms in a sample to become daughters. Where they should be three separate bones, these bones have grown together, Carrano said. Armitages claim that he had been unlawfully terminated was vindicated as the university was unwilling to go to court. The extreme temperatures of the magma would just destroy the bones. Somewhere over the rainbow, my views true; [14][15][16] Blood-derived porphyrin proteins have also been discovered in a mid Eocene mosquito fossil. Significantly, this framework demonstrates the hypotheses presented by Schweitzer et al. Mary Higby Schweitzer is an American paleontologist at North Carolina State University, who led the groups that discovered the remains of blood cells in dinosaur fossils and later discovered soft tissue remains in the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen MOR 1125,[1][2] as well as evidence that the specimen was a pregnant female when she died.[3]. "Once we can get the chemistry behind some of these soft tissues, there's all sorts of questions we can ask of ancient organisms," Schweitzer said. Biblical explanation The global flood about 4.5k years ago and associated tectonic activity and volcanism produced enormously thick sequences of sedimentary rocks over a short period of time. Because the creature had a rounded snout, paleontologists conclude it browsed for foliage at varying heights rather than always feeding low to the ground, per the Guardian. The substance left behind was a stretchy material that showed blood vessels, bone-building cells known as osteocytes and other organic features when observed under As Ive previously pointed out, it is not all that surprising that collagen (or at least fragments of it) could survive 68 million years in an environment devoid of water, oxygen, and microbes given its structure. Ive been trying ever since to disprove it. Iron is an element present in abundance in the body, particularly in the blood, where it is part of the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. Soft tissues, such as blood vessels, cells, and nerves which are stored inside the hard tissue are more delicate and thought to decay rapidly after death. I still havent (Service, 2017). The short half-life is only part of the problem when dating dinosaur bones -- researchers also have to find enough of the parent and daughter atoms to measure. Collagens basic structural unit is called a triple helix, consisting of three protein chains intertwining around each other. Since 2004, soft tissue has been discovered in fossils all over the world, spanning the entire Deep Time continuum, as Dr Brian Thomas at ICR has shown. Even a polymer shield strong enough to resist microbes would develop cracks. Other techniques include analyzing amino acids and measuring changes in an object's magnetic field. This is a remarkably detailed and information-packed paper, Matthew Lamanna, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the new study but helped describe S. musacchioi in 2016, tells Live Sciences Sascha Pare. At the end of the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs went extinct. The soft tissues found by Schweitzer and others are not mineral replacements of soft tissue; they are the original soft tissue. All rights reserved. The discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones was unexpected and scientists have struggled to find a robust explanation. Uniformitarian explanation Sea levels changed gradually over millions of years to produce the enormously thick sequences of sedimentary rocks that record the long history of geological time. "They basically act like formaldehyde.". A thigh bone from a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex has given fossil experts an unexpected treasure: well-preserved soft tissue. News reports around the world tell of red-blood-cell-like and collagen-like structures found in 75 million year-old dinosaur bones long stored in the British Museum. Not only is Ann the first Diamantinasaurus uncovered with a mostly preserved skull, but its also the first fossil of the species with a preserved back foot, per the statement. All these explanations proposed to explain soft tissue in dinosaur bones are tentative and not robust because they involve historical science in which the results of experiments done over a short period of time (maybe a few years) are applied to a long period of time (thousands and millions of years). In a paper published last week in Royal Society Open Science, Poropat and his colleagues detail thesimilarities between Ann and another sauropod discovered in Argentina and described in 2016. The more parent isotopes there are -- and the fewer daughter isotopes -- the younger the sample. "How Do Scientists Determine the Age of Dinosaur Bones?" Fossils represent the biological evolution of species. 1995: spectroscopy and chemical analyses of extracts from a T. rex femur suggested preserved proteins, including a form of collagen abundant in modern animal bones. Such a find is quite rare, lead researcher Stephen Poropat of Australias Curtin University tells the Guardians Donna Lu. There is a lot left to explore. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. and nobody looks," she said. While soft tissue is rare because it decomposes, scientists have found intact soft tissue in dinosaur bones before. But after a volunteer found a bone that turned out to be part of the brain case, Poropat tells the Guardian, that then made all the other bits fall into place.. "The free radicals cause proteins and cell membranes to tie in knots," Schweitzer said. Your Privacy Rights (1/2/2008) http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIE1aAtomicclocks.shtml, USGS. [Paleo-Art: Illustrations Bring Dinosaurs to Life]. The half-life of carbon-14 is only 5,730 years, so carbon-14 dating is only effective on samples that are less than 50,000 years old. However we have no reason to believe that they were not literal years, genesis is very specific, even to odd numbers. If the fragments were due to contamination, they should have mapped randomly onto all regions of the collagen fibers. (2014) and Wiemann et al. 5. [See Images of a Near-Complete T. rex]. Using the basic ideas of bracketing and radiometric dating, researchers have determined the age of rock layers all over the world. Microscopy images of "soft tissues" isolated from bones of the Cretaceous dinosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis (MOR 2598 and GPDM 328), along with extant Struthio camelus analogs. It was really amazing to be able to find a skull at all and even more so to get so much of one that had been preserved.. Observations on life; particularly spiritual, Being fruitful in work, service & relationships, Six reasons to be skeptical of the geologic time scale. Soft fibrillar bone tissue was discovered inside the fossil brow horn of a Triceratops horridus. WebT-Rex in soft Tissue!Tyrannosaurs Rex, the most popular Dinosaur in the world touted to have lived over 70 million years ago has been found in soft tissue. Uniformitarian scientists get upset by statements like these because they assume that the earth is billions of years old and that life began simple and became more complex over time. In recent years, researchers have found 1) epithelial cell and osteoclast remnants; 2) the remains of blood vessels, and 3) heme, and hemoglobin components in the partially fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex femur. No! Once all the parents have become daughters, there's no more basis for comparison between the two isotopes. The famous case is when when American paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University discovered collagen fibers in the fossilized leg bone of a T rex. The structures appear to be genuine remnants of soft tissue; they are not fossilised. That gives him an escape valve. Some of the isotopes used for this purpose are uranium-238, uranium-235 and potassium-40, each of which has a half-life of more than a million years. Iron chelators increased fossil tissue immunoreactivity to multiple antibodies dramatically, suggesting a role for iron in both preserving and masking proteins in fossil tissues. 9/28/1991. Now, the 95-million-year-old fossil is revealing insights into how dinosaurs may have traveled between continents. in Communicative Disorders from Utah State University in 1977, and got a Certificate of Secondary Education in Broadfield Science from Montana State University in 1988. The authors suggest these dinosaurs may have traveled between South America and Australia by crossing Antarctica during the mid-Cretaceous. The mapping study supports the bioauthenticity of the collagen fragments. I have heard there are seven heavens. Red blood cells could be clearly viewed using a thrift store microscope! At present there are two main explanations of the earths geological and climatological history. A chemical framework for the preservation of fossil vertebrate cells and soft tissues. At least six possible explanations (including bacterial contaminants) have been suggested for this preservation of soft tissue in dinosaur bones, but they have all been refuted (Thomas, 2019). These are complex molecules that continually tend to break down to simpler ones. Terms of Use You can watch the tissue stretch in the video. Armitage believes that if dinosaurs have soft tissue in their bones, then something is wrong with the belief system that says the world is billions of years old. The discovery is the latest in several recent - and controversial - soft tissue finds by archaeologists: researchers last November claimed the controversial discovery of It forms minuscule iron nanoparticles and also generates free radicals, which are highly reactive molecules thought to be involved in aging. When paleontologist Mary Schweitzer found soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil, her discovery raised an obvious question -- how the tissue could have survived so long? Based on similarities in the part of the skull surrounding the brain, the bones at the back end of the jaw joint and the curved and conical teeth, the new fossil supports the idea that these two dinosaurs were close relatives, per the statement. In recent decades, soft, squishy tissues have been discovered inside fossilized dinosaur bones. The recent discovery of preserved cells and soft tissues in certain dinosaur bones seems incompatible with an How do scientists know the bones are really 68 million years old? By appealing to the magic of futureware, Landon Andersons statement could be sung to the tune of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.*. On the dig he and others uncovered the largest Triceratops horn ever found at that location. According to new research, iron in the dinosaur's body preserved the tissue before it could decay. To read the time on this radioactive clock, scientists use a device called a mass spectrometer to measure the number of parent and daughter atoms. ]]>. The ratio of parents to daughters can tell the researcher how old the specimen is. Sauropod skulls consist of delicate bones held together by soft tissue and may have been prime targets for predators, Poropat writes in the Conversation. Some day over the rainbow, Ill prove all; The fields of soil and petroleum science even accept that recalcitrant biomarkers can preserve through time as portions of these highly crosslinked kerogen macromolecules (Westbroek et al., 1979; Philp and Gilbert, 1987; Gupta, 2014; Ferrer et al., 2018). One of the most provocative pieces of evidence young-earth creationists cite for a 6,000- to 10,000-year-old Earth is the discovery of soft-tissue remains in a dinosaur specimen that dates around 68 million years old. (LogOut/ The discovery of Ann is helping uncover more details about D. matildae. This means that soft tissue in dinosaur bones provides another reason (besides, living fossils, coastal geomorphology, fossilization of large animals and orally-transmitted Aboriginal stories) to be skeptical of the uniformitarian (geologic) time scale. This process measures isotope decay inside the fossil or the rock to determine its exact age. Since then Schweitzer said, Thats the way science should work. [7] With respect to the significance of her work, Kevin Padian, Curator of Paleontology, University of California Museum of Paleontology, has stated "Chemicals that might degrade in a laboratory over a short period need not do so in a protected natural chemical environmentit's time to readjust our thinking. The new skull of D. matildae is nearly indistinguishable from that of the Argentinian dinosaur, Sarmientosaurus musacchioi. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Her work has appeared in theSag Harbor Expressand has aired onWSHU Public Radio. For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Collagen fibers comprise one of the chief components of connective tissue, are embedded in the bone matrix, and help form blood vessels. Fossils can't form in the igneous rock that usually does contain the isotopes. After a two-year retrieval process, Jack Horner, director of the Museum, gave the femur bone to Schweitzer. Service R F , 2017, I dont care what they say about me: Paleontologist stares down critics in her hunt for dinosaur proteins, Science, Portland, Oregon, 13 Sep, 2017. See his list of published papers documenting soft tissue finds; see also this informative episode with Dr Kevin Anderson from the series, Is Genesis History?. "Geologic Time." Soft tissue impressions are usually of the skin. Are the data driving the paradigm, or vice versa? But you can predict how long it will take a large group of atoms to decay. These soft tissues are composed mainly of proteins, which are believed to completely degrade within about four million years. 2005: dissolving the minerals in a Cretaceous T. rex fossil sample revealed structures that looked like millimeter-long blood vessels that flexed and stretched like real tissue when tugged by tiny tweezers. (1/2/2008) http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg13117884.900-rock-of-ages--cleft-by-laser-if-you-want-to-date-a-rockget-a-laser-thats-the-message-for-geologists-interested-in-the-preciseageof-anything-from-moon-rocks-to-hominid-fossils-.html, Museum Victoria. And Schweitzer has even recovered fragments of the more fragile and complex molecule, DNA. This work shows that at least two of the more popular hypotheses actually share a chemical pathway and overlap quite a bit. If, however, there are too many or too few neutrons, the atom is unstable, and it sheds particles until its nucleus reaches a stable state. Dinosaurs' iron-rich blood, combined with a good environment for fossilization, may explain the amazing existence of soft tissue from the Cretaceous (a period that lasted from about 65.5 million to 145.5 million years ago) and even earlier. "I'd like to find a honking big T. rex that's completely articulated that's still in the ground, or something similar," she said. Wollemi pine: A living fossil Please copy/paste the following text to properly cite this HowStuffWorks.com article: The oldest fossils, microscopic in nature, were discovered in a 3.5 billion-year-old rock in Western Australia. @JesseDornfeld Well the soft tissue is usually in arctic conditions, Ill give you dinosaur bones. Also proteins like collagen, hemoglobin, osteocalcin, actin, and tubulin were found. Chronological index. 2007: microstructures commonly seen in modern collagen were seen in a T. rex sample. But a surprising number of fossil specimens also contained soft tissues, including structures resembling blood vessels, tubular nerve projections, collagen and We have seen that the biblical time scale gives a more realistic explanation of the presence of soft tissue in dinosaur bones than the uniformitarian (geologic) time scale. So they involve huge extrapolations in time. Large numbers of collagen fibrils in turn assemble, with the aid of other proteins, into collagen fibers. Tracy V. Wilson Young-Earth Creationists Arent the Only Skeptics. World's Largest Dinosaur Footprints Discovered in Australia, Lewin, Roger. Evidence for the extraction of short segments of ancient DNA from dinosaur fossils has been reported on two occasions. However we have no reason to believe that they were not literal years, genesis is very specific, even to odd numbers. 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, which lasted from 145.5 million to 199.6 million years ago, Schweitzer said. Scientists have had two decades to think about soft tissue preservation in dinosaur bones. As shown in Appendix B, this belief is largely due to their naturalistic worldview. Be especially wary of distractions and sidesteps. The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins and possibly even DNA can survive millennia. So believing proteins could last for tens of millions of years takes enormous faith. 5. Do some careful reading and see whether his chemical framework for soft tissue preservation makes plausible chemical sense and answers all the objections to the crosslinking hypothesis brought up by Kevin Anderson and Brian Thomas, or whether LAA is desperately looking for rescue devices to preserve deep time. A more recent study (October 2010) published in PLoS ONE contradicts the conclusion of Kaye and supports Schweitzer's original conclusion. Ever since Mary Schweitzer found soft, stretchy tissue in a T. rex fossil in 2004, scientists have been trying to come to grips with how some biological tissues and cells could preserve within ancient critters. "What we found was unusual, because it was still soft and still transparent and still flexible," Schweitzer told LiveScience. His declaration The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose is a half-truth. Appendix B: Different explanations of geological history. But carbon-14 dating won't work on dinosaur bones. "How do geologists date rocks? TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 01, 2009. He doesnt know that, because he tosses the solution into the futureware bucket. If endogenous, putative dinosaur soft tissues should contain diagenetically unstable proteins and phospholipids, vulnerable to hydrolysis, although the released fatty Scientists who had to break a dinosaur bone to remove it from its sandstone location say they have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissues from inside the bone. But for some people, the discovery raised a different question. Scientists have had two decades to think about soft tissue preservation in dinosaur bones. Typically an animals remains mineralizeas they decay, so most specimens of this supposed age consist of inorganic material. Yet Landon Anderson (hence LAA, to distinguish from Kevin Anderson), puts cells and soft tissues in scare quotes so as to raise doubt in the readers mind. The discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones by Mary Schweitzer was unexpected and scientists have struggled to find a robust explanation. Rare 95-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Skull Uncovered in Australia. They seem so fresh that it appears as That idea is not considered by LAA. Along with Her first report of the preserved tissue ( Science, 25 March 2005, p. 1952) was based on preliminary tests. Since the moon and the Earth probably formed at the same time, this supports the current idea of the Earth's age. You would have to invent a Soft tissue has also been extracted from bones that are assumed to be from the Jurassic period which lasted from 145-200 million years. The window between 100 and 95 million years ago was one of the warmest in Earths geologically recent history, meaning that Antarctica, which was more or less where it is now, had no ice, Poropat says in a statement. And so all of you skeptics eat crow; away with you! The soft material was present in pre- and post-decalcified bone. When Mary Schweitzer saw red blood cells in soft dinosaur tissue her supervisor said, Prove to me theyre not. Microscopy images of "soft tissues" isolated from bones of the Cretaceous dinosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis (MOR 2598 and GPDM 328), along with extant Schweitzer's most explosive claim came 2 years later in two papers in Science. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. So it cannot block water and oxygen indefinitely, which readily react with fragile molecules even underground. 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