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.

Oh but we [humans] did [invent logic], the method of logic was derived, defined and is taught by man. Reason is a learned response and few children learn to reason before six. They learn mostly by observation and those without a good example have little reasoning ability.

Dear "Screaming Eagle," thanks for the heads-up to King Prout's recent remarks.

King's very language betrays the underlying fallacy of his argument: He says man "derived" and "defined" logic. (He said this in response to my claim that humans didn't invent logic or reason.)

Okay, from what/whence was logic "derived?" If man has "derived" it, isn't this already a tacit admission that he couldn't simultaneously be the "inventor" of it in the first place?

So it seems to me the very formulation of his argument depends on a premise that is not admitted let alone clarified, while at the same time it is being used as the primary foundation of what we are supposed to assume is a rational argument. To me, this is tantamount to a feat of legerdemain, and I'm not falling for the trick.

We know that a man will attempt to "describe," that is to articulate his experiences in language. Man is a social being, and so naturally desires to communicate his experiences to others.

On this theory, I gather man is ever left to "fall back on himself." He has no ground outside of himself. But that is to fall into a fathomless abyss....

I'm sure there's more to say about this issue, but it'll have to wait till later. Just thinking about this problem makes my head hurt.

Thanks jec41!

But from whence cometh this thing -- logic -- that man "describes?" And this is a very important point; for man's description would be unintelligible to others without recourse to this very thing King Prout seems to claim is an invention of man.

From the father of logic of course.

THE ORIGIN OF ARISTOTLE'S LOGIC1

By Cky J. Carrigan, Ph.D. (Oct 1996)

It is generally agreed that no mortal should rightly claim absolutely original thinking, but occasionally a great mind forms a great original thought. In Aristotle's case a great mind has formed a great original system of thinking. Aristotle (384-322 B. C.) did not form his system of logic in a vacuum of information, but he was clearly the sole originator of the system of logic ascribed to him.

Aristotle's Logic Defined

Norman Geisler identified the four laws of Aristotelian logic: the law of non-contradiction (A is not non-A), the law of identity (A is A), the law of excluded middle (either A or non-A), and the law of rational inference from what is known to what is unknown.2 Colin Brown wrote, "Aristotle regarded it [logic] as a preliminary study to all branches of knowledge calling it an instrument (organon) of study."3 And the Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy suggested that Aristotle's logic was "not a substantive part of philosophy but ancillary to all parts."4

Aristotle did not generally use the term "logic." He preferred the term "analytics." Prior Analytics is the title of his major work on deductive logic and Posterior Analytics is the title of his major work on induction. At the heart of Aristotle's logic was the syllogism. His syllogism was a logical deduction defined in Prior Analytics as:

[A] discourse in which, certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so. I mean by the last phrase that it follows because of them, and by this, that no further term is required from without in order to make the consequence necessary.5

Aristotle saw his logical deduction as a tool, a first kind of wisdom, that guided all kinds of investigations of truth. He wrote,

Natural science also is a kind of wisdom, but it is not the first kind.--And the attempts of some who discuss the terms on which truth should be accepted, are due to a want of training in logic. . . Evidently then the philosopher, who is studying the nature of all substance, must inquire also into the principles of deduction.6

Aristotle also saw his first kind of wisdom, as unacquired7 and therefore innate in humans and other animals. Those animals with memories were able then to do induction. For Aristotle, universals were self-evident. Increased empirical knowledge did not produce basic perceptions (logic). The universal principle is known actually (deduction) and the particular case (induction or demonstration) is known potentially. He wrote,

And this [deduction] evidently belongs to all animals; for they have a connate discriminatory capacity, which is called perception. . . in some animals retention of the percept comes about. . . And from experience, or from the whole universal that has come to rest in the soul. . . there comes a principle of skill and of understanding [induction, demonstration]. . .8

Original or Derived Logic?

Aristotle's biographers and philosophers generally agreed that Aristotle was the father of logic. But they stopped short of ascribing to him absolute originality as well.9 Unfortunately, the consulted authorities did not produce any highly developed arguments to support their caution. Observe the following guarded propositions: Will Durant wrote, "Almost without predecessors, almost entirely by his own hard thinking, he created a new science--Logic." About Aristotle's new science Durant wrote, "Before Aristotle, science was embryo; with him it was born."10 Marjorie Grene asserted, "In logic. . . he may fairly claim to have had no predecessor."11 Norman Geisler offered this statement about the origins and nature of logic, "Aristotle didn't invent logic; he only helped to discover it."12 And G. E. Lloyd suggested that Aristotle's logic was "very largely original."13

Alfred Weber, like others, granted both originality and dependance to Aristotle but his treatment of Aristotle's dependance was more thorough than the rest. He called Aristotle "the real founder of logic," but he added that Aristotle "was not the first to conceive all the principles of logic." Weber, wrote:

[T]he discussions of the Eleatics, the Sophists,and the Socratics [pp. 9-53], have shown us how reason gradually became conscious of the processes which it originally employed instinctively; thus the elementary axioms. . . and without doubt also the more special rules of the syllogism came to be formulated. But it required the genius of an Aristotle to co-ordinate these elements, to complete them, and to formulate them into the system of deductive logic, which constitutes his chief claim to fame.14

Aristotle clearly saw himself as the originator of systematic logic, or at least the originator of deductive logic. For logic, he abandoned his usual pattern of inquiry which set forth the views of his predecessors before working out his own solution.15 Evidence of Aristotle's self-understanding as a pioneer in logic may be found in the Sophistical Refutations of The Organon. In it he wrote,

Of the present inquiry [the formalistic structure of syllogistic reasoning], on the other hand, it was not the case that part of the work had been thoroughly done before, while part had not. Nothing existed at all. . . . [W]hereas on the subject of deduction we had absolutely nothing else of an earlier date to mention, but were kept at work for a long time in experimental researches.16

Aristotle did not derive his logic from Plato though Plato's influence on Aristotle was considerable.17 Lloyd wrote, "It is certain that Plato was by far the most important formative influence on Aristotle's thought."18 David Ross suggested that "there is no page [of Aristotle's philosophy] which does not bear the impress of Platonism."19 Weber represented the general understanding of Aristotle's biographers when he made the following assertion: While Aristotle did not learn his logic from Plato, traces of Plato's abstractions and generalities may be found in Aristotle's "original doctrine of the syllogism."20

Aristotle disagreed with Plato's common manner of reasoning for all disciplines.21 Interacting with Plato's method he wrote, "One cannot therefore prove anything by crossing from another genus. . ."22 Aristotle was referring to Plato's divisions of logic when he wrote, "It is easy to see that division by genera is a small part of the method we have described; for division is, so to speak, a weak deduction; for what it ought to prove, it begs. . ."23

Modern Evaluation

While most modern critics concede Aristotle's brilliance for systemization and his abiding influence on western civilization, they generally question some of his assumptions about thought.24 Durant wrote, "He [Aristotle] thinks the syllogism is [a] description of man's way of reasoning, whereas it merely describes man's way of dressing up his reasoning for the persuasion of another mind. . . thought begins with hypothetical conclusions and seeks their justifying premises."25 Even some who emphatically affirm the four Aristotelian laws of logic question something about the syllogism. Geisler asserted, "since there are very few premises that even most thinking men agree are universally true, the effectiveness of Aristotle's method for discovering truth is seriously reduced."26 The most striking criticism of Aristotle's logic comes from Postmodern philosophers. Jacque Derrida is an extreme example of this stream of thinking. His main concern was to undermine structuralism based on an anti-metaphysical world view.27

Conclusion

Aristotle was clearly the sole originator of the system of logic ascribed to him, though he did not derive his system from thin air. Aristotle did not form his logic on Plato's logic, but Platonic universals and abstracts may have indirectly contributed to the syllogism. Aristotle's modal syllogism may not have been the first or last word on logic, but his systemization of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle were based upon brilliant observations of what is self-evident and undeniable.

"You truly are delusional."

Not. This is the what was said:

"Oh you fine example of integrity(NOT).(you)"

Speak for yourself. (me)

I am. (you)"

You admitted it was actually you without integrity. I was so proud of you. What happened? :(

"I negated the statement "Oh you fine example of integrity". That certainly is not a mention of no integrity."

Which means no integrity. I originally thought you were talking about me, but when I said "speak for yourself", you said you were. It's always helpful to admit you have a problem. Too bad you jumped off the wagon. Just remember, first things first. We'll love you, until you learn to love yourself.

Don't worry, recovery takes time.

"Any evidence contrary to the dogma will be marginalized and ridiculed." That does not state, in any fashion, that any theory or dogma has been falsified."

You said that there was evidence that was against evolution, but was being suppressed. All while saying that evolution is unfalsifiable. That's not possible logically for both to be true.

"I repeat, "I contend that Darwinism is also non-falsifiable.""

And I repeat, that goes against your claim that evidence exists against evolution.

Without being supported by evidence one contention is no better than another. You act as if the fact that a contention doesn't have to be supported by evidence to be called a contention means that a contention doesn't need to be supported by evidence to be taken seriously.

Unfalsifiable claims cannot, by definition, have evidence that goes against them. Yet you claim that evolution is both unfalsifiable AND has evidence that goes against it (which is vigorously suppressed by a secret conspiracy of evolutionists). There is a deep logical contradiction in your position, and you are not man enough to admit it.

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