Posted on 10/03/2009 7:50:29 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Two years ago, Schweitzer gazed through a microscope in her laboratory at North Carolina State University and saw lifelike tissue that had no business inhabiting a fossilized dinosaur skeleton: fibrous matrix, stretchy like a wet scab on human skin; what appeared to be supple bone cells, their three-dimensional shapes intact; and translucent blood vessels that looked as if they could have come straight from an ostrich at the zoo.
By all the rules of paleontology, such traces of life should have long since drained from the bones. It's a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at most for a few tens of thousands of years, not the 65 million since T. rex walked what's now the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. But Schweitzer tends to ignore such dogma. She just looks and wonders, pokes and prods, following her scientific curiosity. That has allowed her to see things other paleontologists have missed—and potentially to shatter fundamental assumptions about how much we can learn from the past. If biological tissue can last through the fossilization process, it could open a window through time, showing not just how extinct animals evolved but how they lived each day. "Fossils have richer stories to tell—about the lub-dub of dinosaur life—than we have been willing to listen to," says Robert T. Bakker, curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. "This is one spectacular proof of that."
At the same time, the contents of those T. rex bones have also electrified some creationists, who interpret Schweitzer's findings as evidence that Earth is not nearly as old as scientists claim. "I invite the reader to step back and contemplate the obvious," wrote Carl Wieland on the Answers in Genesis Web site last year. "This discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most."
Rhetoric like this has put Schweitzer at the center of a raging cultural controversy, because she is not just a pioneering paleontologist but also an evangelical Christian. That fact alone has prompted some prominent paleontologists to be even more skeptical about her scientific research. Some creationists have questioned her work from the other direction, pressing her to refute Darwinian evolution. But in her religious life, Schweitzer is no more of an ideologue than she is in her scientific career. In both realms, she operates with a simple but powerful consistency: The best way to understand the glory of the world is to open your eyes and take an honest look at what is out there.
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and the news that humans did come from monkeys but from ancient liberal humans has also astonished them.
Not a good week for evolutionists
See also here :
http://www.redding.com/news/2009/may/11/opinion-columnists/
EXCERPT :
No one would believe that dinosaur DNA would be preserved for 67 million years or more, and no one has found any. Similarly, no one would believe protein would be preserved for such a length of time, but Mary Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University, along with other colleagues found such protein and published this in 2007. Her team dissolved the mineral portion of a T. rex bone fragment of the same time period as Sue, and from the same Hell Creek Formation. They looked for any soft tissue residue. They found a residue that appeared to show a branching blood vessel, protein fragments and possible red blood cells.
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Mary Schweitzer and a wide group of experts present evidence for proteins from an 80-million-year old hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur. From excavation to biochemical analysis, the sample was handled in a way to preclude contamination. Demineralization was carried out independently in different labs; soft-tissue residue was sent to different labs for mass spectrometry studies. All concluded there was collagen present as well as two other proteins found in blood vessel walls. Subsequent studies showed the hadrosaur collagen to be more closely related to the T. rex collagen and to modern birds than to other species.
This raises the quite unexpected possibility of doing genetics, via proteins, on dinosaurs and on other ancient species as well. The backbone of a protein is made up of a chain of amino acids. The DNA of genes dictates the sequence of amino acids in the protein chain. Since the investigators were able to establish the amino acid sequences in the protein fragments they had, they should be able to infer the genetic code that specified each sequence. This is going back to the way genetic studies were done before we could study DNA directly - we simply looked at protein structural differences.
Great article! A real eye opener to the thought that the dinos were here just a short time ago...rather exciting if you ask me.
SITREP
BTW, Many scientists argue that UNDER THE RIGHT CONDITIONS, DNA can survive a long time.
I know, with all the natural preservatives in nature, there’s no telling what we can find if we look in the right places. That is truly exciting that dinos could’ve been here such a short time ago. I firmly believe in the Creation by the Almighty God. Nothing I have read on Darwin has changed my mind in the least.
Simple answer: it didn't. That stuff is a few thousand or a couple of tens of thousands of years old at most.
did you see the articles that evidence now shows monkeys evolved from liberal-splinter humans and not the other way around?
Ping!
There have been perhaps a dozen, perhaps more, topics on this, and very few worth pingin’, unfortunately. Thanks FrogMom!
LOL!
Cheers!
LOL! Now that’s one breed that is becoming extinct!
Schweitzer didn’t produce the expected results so she must be wrong.
Could be. Some think the soft tissue could be from contamination.
That’s been thoroughly debunked. The tissue is definitely and obviously that of the dinosaur. No kind of contamination could produce blood vessels and hemoglobin inside of bones.
Where did you see that?
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