Dinosaur Shocker (YEC say dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years)

Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen showing a network of thin, branching vessels. That’s right, blood vessels. From a dinosaur. “Ho-ho-ho, I am excite-e-e-e-d,” she chuckles. “I am, like, really excited.”

After 68 million years in the ground, a Tyrannosaurus rex found in Montana was dug up, its leg bone was broken in pieces, and fragments were dissolved in acid in Schweitzer’s laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “Cool beans,” she says, looking at the image on the screen.

It was big news indeed last year when Schweitzer announced she had discovered blood vessels and structures that looked like whole cells inside that T. rex bone—the first observation of its kind. The finding amazed colleagues, who had never imagined that even a trace of still-soft dinosaur tissue could survive. After all, as any textbook will tell you, when an animal dies, soft tissues such as blood vessels, muscle and skin decay and disappear over time, while hard tissues like bone may gradually acquire minerals from the environment and become fossils. Schweitzer, one of the first scientists to use the tools of modern cell biology to study dinosaurs, has upended the conventional wisdom by showing that some rock-hard fossils tens of millions of years old may have remnants of soft tissues hidden away in their interiors. “The reason it hasn’t been discovered before is no right-thinking paleontologist would do what Mary did with her specimens. We don’t go to all this effort to dig this stuff out of the ground to then destroy it in acid,” says dinosaur paleontologist Thomas Holtz Jr., of the University of Maryland. “It’s great science.” The observations could shed new light on how dinosaurs evolved and how their muscles and blood vessels worked. And the new findings might help settle a long-running debate about whether dinosaurs were warmblooded, coldblooded—or both.

Meanwhile, Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

It may be that Schweitzer’s unorthodox approach to paleontology can be traced to her roundabout career path. Growing up in Helena, Montana, she went through a phase when, like many kids, she was fascinated by dinosaurs. In fact, at age 5 she announced she was going to be a paleontologist. But first she got a college degree in communicative disorders, married, had three children and briefly taught remedial biology to high schoolers. In 1989, a dozen years after she graduated from college, she sat in on a class at Montana State University taught by paleontologist Jack Horner, of the Museum of the Rockies, now an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. The lectures reignited her passion for dinosaurs. Soon after, she talked her way into a volunteer position in Horner’s lab and began to pursue a doctorate in paleontology.

She initially thought she would study how the microscopic structure of dinosaur bones differs depending on how much the animal weighs. But then came the incident with the red spots.

AdvertisementIn 1991, Schweitzer was trying to study thin slices of bones from a 65-million-year-old T. rex. She was having a hard time getting the slices to stick to a glass slide, so she sought help from a molecular biologist at the university. The biologist, Gayle Callis, happened to take the slides to a veterinary conference, where she set up the ancient samples for others to look at. One of the vets went up to Callis and said, “Do you know you have red blood cells in that bone?” Sure enough, under a microscope, it appeared that the bone was filled with red disks. Later, Schweitzer recalls, “I looked at this and I looked at this and I thought, this can’t be. Red blood cells don’t preserve.”

Schweitzer showed the slide to Horner. “When she first found the red-blood-cell-looking structures, I said, Yep, that’s what they look like,” her mentor recalls. He thought it was possible they were red blood cells, but he gave her some advice: “Now see if you can find some evidence to show that that’s not what they are.”

What she found instead was evidence of heme in the bones—additional support for the idea that they were red blood cells. Heme is a part of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in the blood and gives red blood cells their color. “It got me real curious as to exceptional preservation,” she says. If particles of that one dinosaur were able to hang around for 65 million years, maybe the textbooks were wrong about fossilization.

Schweitzer tends to be self-deprecating, claiming to be hopeless at computers, lab work and talking to strangers. But colleagues admire her, saying she’s determined and hard-working and has mastered a number of complex laboratory techniques that are beyond the skills of most paleontologists. And asking unusual questions took a lot of nerve. “If you point her in a direction and say, don’t go that way, she’s the kind of person who’ll say, Why?—and she goes and tests it herself,” says Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist at Florida State University. Schweitzer takes risks, says Karen Chin, a University of Colorado paleontologist. “It could be a big payoff or it could just be kind of a ho-hum research project.”

In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from the Museum of the Rockies, was eating his lunch in a remote Montana canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. That bone turned out to be part of what may be the best preserved T. rex in the world. Over the next three summers, workers chipped away at the dinosaur, gradually removing it from the cliff face. They called it B. rex in Harmon’s honor and nicknamed it Bob. In 2001, they encased a section of the dinosaur and the surrounding dirt in plaster to protect it. The package weighed more than 2,000 pounds, which turned out to be just above their helicopter’s capacity, so they split it in half. One of B. rex’s leg bones was broken into two big pieces and several fragments—just what Schweitzer needed for her micro-scale explorations.

It turned out Bob had been misnamed. “It’s a girl and she’s pregnant,” Schweitzer recalls telling her lab technician when she looked at the fragments. On the hollow inside surface of the femur, Schweitzer had found scraps of bone that gave a surprising amount of information about the dinosaur that made them. Bones may seem as steady as stone, but they’re actually constantly in flux. Pregnant women use calcium from their bones to build the skeleton of a developing fetus. Before female birds start to lay eggs, they form a calcium-rich structure called medullary bone on the inside of their leg and other bones; they draw on it during the breeding season to make eggshells. Schweitzer had studied birds, so she knew about medullary bone, and that’s what she figured she was seeing in that T. rex specimen.

Most paleontologists now agree that birds are the dinosaurs’ closest living relatives. In fact, they say that birds are dinosaurs—colorful, incredibly diverse, cute little feathered dinosaurs. The theropod of the Jurassic forests lives on in the goldfinch visiting the backyard feeder, the toucans of the tropics and the ostriches loping across the African savanna.

To understand her dinosaur bone, Schweitzer turned to two of the most primitive living birds: ostriches and emus. In the summer of 2004, she asked several ostrich breeders for female bones. A farmer called, months later. “Y’all still need that lady ostrich?” The dead bird had been in the farmer’s backhoe bucket for several days in the North Carolina heat. Schweitzer and two colleagues collected a leg from the fragrant carcass and drove it back to Raleigh.

AdvertisementAs far as anyone can tell, Schweitzer was right: Bob the dinosaur really did have a store of medullary bone when she died. A paper published in Science last June presents microscope pictures of medullary bone from ostrich and emu side by side with dinosaur bone, showing near-identical features.

In the course of testing a B. rex bone fragment further, Schweitzer asked her lab technician, Jennifer Wittmeyer, to put it in weak acid, which slowly dissolves bone, including fossilized bone—but not soft tissues. One Friday night in January 2004, Wittmeyer was in the lab as usual. She took out a fossil chip that had been in the acid for three days and put it under the microscope to take a picture. “[The chip] was curved so much, I couldn’t get it in focus,” Wittmeyer recalls. She used forceps to flatten it. “My forceps kind of sunk into it, made a little indentation and it curled back up. I was like, stop it!” Finally, through her irritation, she realized what she had: a fragment of dinosaur soft tissue left behind when the mineral bone around it had dissolved. Suddenly Schweitzer and Wittmeyer were dealing with something no one else had ever seen. For a couple of weeks, Wittmeyer said, it was like Christmas every day.

In the lab, Wittmeyer now takes out a dish with six compartments, each holding a little brown dab of tissue in clear liquid, and puts it under the microscope lens. Inside each specimen is a fine network of almost-clear branching vessels—the tissue of a female Tyrannosaurus rex that strode through the forests 68 million years ago, preparing to lay eggs. Close up, the blood vessels from that T. rex and her ostrich cousins look remarkably alike. Inside the dinosaur vessels are things Schweitzer diplomatically calls “round microstructures” in the journal article, out of an abundance of scientific caution, but they are red and round, and she and other scientists suspect that they are red blood cells.

Of course, what everyone wants to know is whether DNA might be lurking in that tissue. Wittmeyer, from much experience with the press since the discovery, calls this “the awful question”—whether Schweitzer’s work is paving the road to a real-life version of science fiction’s Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs were regenerated from DNA preserved in amber. But DNA, which carries the genetic script for an animal, is a very fragile molecule. It’s also ridiculously hard to study because it is so easily contaminated with modern biological material, such as microbes or skin cells, while buried or after being dug up. Instead, Schweitzer has been testing her dinosaur tissue samples for proteins, which are a bit hardier and more readily distinguished from contaminants. Specifically, she’s been looking for collagen, elastin and hemoglobin. Collagen makes up much of the bone scaffolding, elastin is wrapped around blood vessels and hemoglobin carries oxygen inside red blood cells.

Because the chemical makeup of proteins changes through evolution, scientists can study protein sequences to learn more about how dinosaurs evolved. And because proteins do all the work in the body, studying them could someday help scientists understand dinosaur physiology—how their muscles and blood vessels worked, for example.

Proteins are much too tiny to pick out with a microscope. To look for them, Schweitzer uses antibodies, immune system molecules that recognize and bind to specific sections of proteins. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have been using antibodies to chicken collagen, cow elastin and ostrich hemoglobin to search for similar molecules in the dinosaur tissue. At an October 2005 paleontology conference, Schweitzer presented preliminary evidence that she has detected real dinosaur proteins in her specimens.

Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”

young-earth creationists also see Schweitzer’s work as revolutionary, but in an entirely different way. They first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”

This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”

By definition, there is a lot that scientists don’t know, because the whole point of science is to explore the unknown. By being clear that scientists haven’t explained everything, Schweitzer leaves room for other explanations. “I think that we’re always wise to leave certain doors open,” she says.

But schweitzer’s interest in the long-term preservation of molecules and cells does have an otherworldly dimension: she’s collaborating with NASA scientists on the search for evidence of possible past life on Mars, Saturn’s moon Titan, and other heavenly bodies. (Scientists announced this spring, for instance, that Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus appears to have liquid water, a probable precondition for life.)

Astrobiology is one of the wackier branches of biology, dealing in life that might or might not exist and might or might not take any recognizable form. “For almost everybody who works on NASA stuff, they are just in hog heaven, working on astrobiology questions,” Schweitzer says. Her NASA research involves using antibodies to probe for signs of life in unexpected places. “For me, it’s the means to an end. I really want to know about my dinosaurs.”

AdvertisementTo that purpose, Schweitzer, with Wittmeyer, spends hours in front of microscopes in dark rooms. To a fourth-generation Montanan, even the relatively laid-back Raleigh area is a big city. She reminisces wistfully about scouting for field sites on horseback in Montana. “Paleontology by microscope is not that fun,” she says. “I’d much rather be out tromping around.”

“My eyeballs are just absolutely fried,” Schweitzer says after hours of gazing through the microscope’s eyepieces at glowing vessels and blobs. You could call it the price she pays for not being typical.

Really, anything over about 50,000 years old, should theoretically have no detectable 14C left.3 Perhaps you would like to clarify or correct?

Sure, I'll correct it -- as usual, AnswersInGenesis is full of crap, which is why I yet again have to wonder why you keep linking them at every available opportunity, instead of bothering to use *reliable* sources from actual science journals. Hint: AiG is in the business of propagandizing against real science, and they're not above completely twisting the truth to do it.

Dave, why do you keep using their material? Is it out of a complete disregard for accuracy, or out of outright dishonesty?

Let's take your above bit of nonsense, straight from AiG as an example. You mindlessly parrot them saying, "Really, anything over about 50,000 years old, should theoretically have no detectable 14C left". This is, of course, completely horse crap. 50,000 years is 8.7 half-lives of 14C, so after 50,000 years 2^(-8.7) or 0.24% of the original 14C will be present. This is hardly the same as "theoretically no detectable 14C" -- neither in theory NOR in practice. That's far above the sensitivity of AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) equipment,, and radiocarbon dating under good conditions can be accurately achieved on samples up to 58,000 years old. See for example ABOX radiocarbon dating of archaeological charcoal. AiG also "forgets" to mention, during all of its hand-waving attempts to try to dishonestly raise false doubts about radiocarbon dates, that the results of such testing -- even up to 58,000 years (well beyond the 50,000 that AiG claims is "impossible" even in "theory") -- matches the dates given by COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT methods of dating the same samples, such as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) techniques for example. How does AiG explain *THAT*? Oh, right, they don't. They wouldn't want to call their readers' attention to any facts that make it obvious that AiG is spinning bulls**t.

Dave, how about this -- if I can go through the two links you just provided, and show you, say, five examples of gross "error", and five examples of gross misrepresentation in an attempt to dishonestly "spin" the impression in the direction that AiG wants the reader to get (i.e., in order to falsely give an impression that radiocarbon dating is entirely unreliable), will you agree to finally stop posting their lies?

Or do you not *care* that you're providing grossly misleading and grossly inaccurate "information" to your fellow Freepers?

Ideas have consequences. Evil ideas have evil consequences. And I will add that Ideology's have consequences, Evil Ideology's have consequences.

Anti-evolutionism is evil, being based on intentional lies and misrepresentations.

Thanks for pointing out that "by their fruits shall ye know them".

Evolutionary biology, on the other hand, is no "evil idea", it's merely observations of how living things change over time. This is no more "evil" than observing and reporting how mountain ranges change over time -- no matter how much you guys froth and scream nonsense to the contrary.

I'm sorry that simply reporting reality freaks you guys out so much, but that's not *my* problem.

"If humans share 98% of their genes with chimps, why can't that suggest a common Creator rather than a common ancestor?"

Actually, it does BOTH.

A common creator in the sense that naturally genes are very similar in the sense that the original design for life on earth followed the same basic pattern - so if you want to believe that this is due to God choosing that basic pattern you certainly can.

As far as the genetic similarity indicating the development of the species since the original creation of life on earth (ie, "the dreaded 'E' word"), well, it certainly does that too.

One need only examine the developmental stages that early human embryos go through (showing fish, then reptilian, and finally mammalian features) to get a clue - one would HOPE (against hope) at least....

Just got home from work. I knew the damage control would be in full swing.

Yes, the anti-evolutionists are in full swing. Those of us conversant with mainstream biology, on the other hand, are just amused.

I am happy to see you've considered my previous posts "substantive"

You have *really* got to work on your reading comprehension. No, that's not what I said.

although from the comments I've received in response, one could scarcely form that impression.

Perhaps you might get a clue from that fact.

And having noted the frequency with which frevolutionists engage in cheap shots and spiteful one-liners, I can hardly confess any guilt over mine.

It's hardly "cheap shots and spiteful one-liners" to accurately describe the behavior of the anti-evolutionists and the abysmal quality of their "material", although it is true that such frank assessments will be less than complimentary.

Seriously, Dave, when we call anti-evolution efforts "idiotic", it's not a "cheap shot", nor "spiteful", it's objective review. If that bothers you, get your cohorts to increase the quality of their material. We're tired of trying to educate them on a subject they're dead-set on remaining ignorant about, or filling their heads with Things That Just Ain't So because they find the false propaganda more comforting than the things they're afraid they'll find in the science journals.

I really like little Blossom, shes quite the cutie...

The folks I told you about, who lived in back in my parents in California, and had a large number of the miniature horses, took us for a tour of their ranch...we got to see all their miniature horses...they were so cute, and friendly, just like dogs, ran up to us, nuzzled us, tried to get close to us, and investigate what we were doing...

In another part of the ranch, they had a smaller penned in area, with a small barn....in that smaller penned in area, they had about 4-5 miniature horses, that had some birth defects, supposedly because they were too closely bred with other minis on the ranch....they were so very sweet...most of their birth defects, showed up in their faces....

I remember this one little miniature horse, named Timmy...his whole snout was not as it should have been...it was too short, and much too wide...he was just the sweetest horse, and the absolute favorite of all the school groups that came through on tours...all the horses on that ranch were great, but special attention was always paid to those few horses with birth defects....

I guess one has to be careful when breeding them...

If humans share 98% of their genes with chimps, why can't that suggest a common Creator rather than a common ancestor?

Because "common design" and "common ancestry" produce *very* different types of characteristic similarities *and* differences.

There are very specific kinds and patterns of similarities, *and* differences, along multiple independent and cross-confirming lines of evidence, which overwhelmingly support evolutionary origins. See this link if you want to start delving into the details, but the short form is that evolutionary processes would produce *very* specific kinds of similarities across lineages, and *very* specific kinds of differences -- patterns which would *not* be produced by "design" processes, unless the designer was being intentionally deceitful and purposely mimicking the byproducts of evolution. And those evolutionary patterns are exactly what we find when we analyze DNA, at every level, in every genome, in every way we've thought to test so far, hundreds of thousands of times over.

This is not some mere coincidence or loose "similarity". This is a rich, deep, detailed history of evolutionary "tracers" which are embedded in every genome in hundreds of conceivable ways.

It's no overstatement to say that to any objective observer who has taken the time to actually view and understand the DNA evidence, the debate over whether life on Earth evolved through common ancestry is *over*. The evidence is just vastly overwhelming that it did.

If you're unclear as to how science actually tests its analyses of the evidence to ensure that they are valid, see this post. This post also covers, in general, how common descent is distinguished from design hypotheses when testing the evidence.

Furthermore, people often use a programming analogy, it should be pointed out that no one could possibly mistake the results of "evolutionary programming" (like genetic algorithms, etc., whereby evolution is harnessed to produce program code without direct human intervention or programming) for the results of a program written directly by a programmer (i.e. "designer"), even one which incorporated a lot of "code re-use" or cut-and-paste from other projects.

The results of the two methods of producing programs are *vastly* different in character and structure, and any programmer could tell at a glance whether a particular program was actually written by a human, or "grown/evolved" via genetic algorithms. And the same goes for DNA -- it looks exactly like the results of an evolutionary process, and not at all like the results of a "design team".

Re: the max age of radiocarbon dating.

Depends on the lab, sample, and methods.

There are experiments for the AMS (Accelerator Mass Spectrometry) method going back toward 80,000 years, but that is experimental, not yet a standard, commercially-available practice.

For some materials, contamination is a problem, and I would be careful. Charcoal can absorb humic acids, which, while the labs try to remove them, can be a problem with extremely old samples.

The smaller the quantity of remaining 14C (i.e., the older the sample) the more care needs to be taken with sample selection. That's why creationists are able to find dinosaur bones which date 35,000 or so years old--they get samples bone contaminated by groundwater. They love such contamination! Real scientists do their best to get clean samples. (How many samples did the creationists obtain with results like >50,000 years before they got one contaminated enough that they liked the result?

Lesson: Never rely on only one sample! If you have an old and important specimen, do several or many different samples and use a couple of different labs. Make sure the sample is not contaminated. (If its just a piece of shell from a 3,000 year old site, no big deal. The dates will come out just fine.)

And never, never, ever listen to the young earth types or creation websites when it comes to this kind of science. Their belief blinds them to actual data, and they will stretch things any old which way to try and match their beliefs. Scientists are not like that; if the data heads in an unexpected direction, we can accept it.

As Heinlein noted,

Belief gets in the way of learning.
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973

[So mankind is simpler...and simpler...and simpler the farther in time we go back.]

Is it commonly thought then that all mammals (pigs, horses, whatever) were simpler in intelligence thousands of years ago than today? In other words, our modern day sheep are much more intelligent than they were a few thousand years ago? Every animal is evolving smarter in their intellect? 30,000 years ago did we have a bunch of dumb animals? And 30,000 years from now, if they're still around, sheep will be much more intelligent?

Well first, most of the time a few thousand years isn't going to cover a great deal of evolutionary change. You should look at much larger time spans to get a more "big picture" view.

But the primary point is that beyond a certain point, intelligence isn't that critical for a lot of animal species, and for those animals evolutionary pressures will likely be at work honing *other* abilities, not "IQ". For early humans, however, intelligence *was* more critical to our survival, and thus we "specialized" in better brains while cheetahs, for example, specialized in being fast enough to better outrun their prey. There's not just one "success strategy" in all of nature -- different species "specialize" in different abilities.

Often there are real tradeoffs. For example, blind cave fish are blind not only because they no longer need their eyes (since they live in darkness), but because a quirk in their biochemistry makes it so that by losing their eyes, they are able to smell better -- which is obviously a big help in a lightless environment. Their cousin species which still live in the open, however, are better off keeping their eyes, and getting by with a less acute sense of smell. There's a trade-off between the two senses, and which balance evolution achieves along the possible continiuum of the trade-off depends strongly on the exact needs of the species, and that depends heavily on its current environment.

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