Image from Proslogion article, which has the link to the photo credit.
Posted on 04/02/2013 10:13:02 AM PDT by fishtank
Soft Bone Tissue in a Triceratops Fossil
Posted by jlwile on March 27, 2013
A triceratops skull like the one from which the horn in the study came. (click for credit) These are exciting times to be a creationist! Ever since Dr. Mary Schweitzer first demonstrated the existence of soft tissue in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that is supposed to be 65 million years old,1 soft tissue is turning up in all sorts of supposedly ancient fossils (see here, here, here, and here for more information). The latest example comes from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana, which is supposed to be about 65 million years old, so the fossil is assumed to be that old as well. The fossil in question is a horn from a Triceratops horridus specimen. After it was collected, it broke in several places, indicating that the fossil had been fractured. Since the fossil was broken, the authors of the study decided to get rid of the “hard parts” of the fossil to see if there was anything soft inside. To do this, they soaked the horn in a weak acid for a month.
As the acid ate away at the minerals that formed the horn, the authors found strips of light brown, soft tissue remaining. Now this soft stuff could be from all manner of things, so the authors decided to do a microscopic study of the tissue, and what they found was was exactly what you would expect to see if you examined the tissue from the bone of a recently deceased animal!2
When they examined the tissue under a light microscope, they found well-defined, circular Haversian systems. In case you aren’t familiar with that term, compact bone is made of cylindrical structures formed by bone cells that are called osteocytes. The drawing below shows what a Haversian system looks like:
Diagram of a Haversian system in compact bone (Click for credit) Note that the center of the cylinder is a canal called the Haversian canal. The authors show that the Haversian canals they saw in the tissue were filled with structures that strongly resemble red blood cells!
Since the tissue looks like compact bone tissue, the most reasonable conclusion is that it comes from the Triceratops fossil. Given that, there is another question to answer: are these Haversian systems fossilized or not? After all, it is possible that the fossilization process is so precise that it preserves structures on the cellular level. Given the fact that the tissue was soft, that’s unlikely, but I suppose it’s still a possibility.
To answer this question, the authors looked at the Haversian systems with a scanning electron microscope, and you can see pictures of what they saw here. The osteocytes that make up the Haversian systems seem completely intact, all the way down to their fragile filipodial extensions. In fact, the authors note:
Filipodial extensions were delicate and showed no evidence of any permineralization or crystallization artifact and therefore were interpreted to be soft.
So it really seems like they were seeing intact, soft osteocytes from a Triceratops fossil found in the Hell Creek Formation. It is hard enough to understand how a bone cell can exist like that for thousands of years. The idea that it has lasted for 65 million years simply boggles the mind.
In my mind, this study is strong evidence against the idea that the fossils in the Hell Creek Formation are millions of years old.
REFERENCES
1. Mary H. Schweitzer, Jennifer L. Wittmeyer, John R. Horner, and Jan K. Toporski, “Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex,” Science, 307:1952-1955, 2005 Return to Text
2. Mark Hollis Armitage and Kevin Lee Anderson, “Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus,” Acta Histochemica, doi: 10.1016/j.acthis.2013.01.001, 2103
Return to Text
Image from Proslogion article, which has the link to the photo credit.
I bumped into a second article.
hmmm, how soon can I purchase a triceratops?
So....can it be cloned or not?
“how soon can I purchase a triceratops?”
Yeah! I’d bet one grazing in my front yard would keep the teenagers off my grass!
I'm mounting a Dillon Aero minigun on each horn, with a custom made ammo saddle bags on its sides...about where my stirrups go.
Of course there will be a friggin' green laser on his head....
....now if I could just find some ammo.....
“It is hard enough to understand how a bone cell can exist like that for thousands of years. The idea that it has lasted for 65 million years simply boggles the mind.”
That statement is an example of scientific ignorance. Original cellular matter can be preserved almost indefinitely within an environment conducive to the inhibition of hydrolysis, biological consumption, and other destructivee processees. Although the opportunities for such preservation may be relatively rare, there is no physical reason why such preservation cannot occur when the environmental conditions are suitable.
from the theological point of view it can be observed such long preservation timees are possible due to the way uin which the Creator designed everything to operate.
Can you name any Creationists who aren’t Christian, Orthodox Jewish, or Muslim?
Only if they are all walking into a bar at the same time.
haha.
Honestly, I have no idea.
LOL!
Is posting this a Hate Crime against the religion of Evolution?
No, it can’t be cloned.
What they’re finding isn’t DNA, but unfossilized protein or protein fragments. For example, when they say they found red blood cells, that’s not usually what they observed. They found traces of heme, the protein that’s part of hemoglobin, still in the fossil.
DNA is remarkably fragile. Unless it’s specially preserved for future testing, there’s usually too much degradation and contamination for it to be useful for very long.
Every atheist is a Creationist in his own mind, because he had to have designed and created himself; however, lacking any rationale for having done so as a matter of first causation, he doesn't have the slightest idea why he did it, he is too stupid to remember how he did it, and every attempt he has ever made to repeat "scientifically" what he thinks he might have done has failed miserably.
Remarkably, after all that he still just looks in the mirror, and worships what he sees.
FReegards!
There's a bunch of Hindu creationists, whose beliefs are based on the Vedic texts being literally true.
I don’t think anyone said it was impossible. The extraordinary unlikelihood (is that a word?) of such a necessary set of circumstances does, indeed, boggle the mind; mine anyway.
That’s a shame...but, thanks for the interesting info...
I got this response to a similar question on another site:
I take it you mean professional scientists/philosophers. A very famous one was Cambridge astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. Hoyle - whom many (most?) astronomers agree should really have been awarded the Nobel Prize - rejected an evolutionary origin for life given the huge statistical and scientific odds against it, but he didn’t want to give up atheism, so he came up with the theory of “directed panspermia”, which posits that life on Earth was seeded by some alien life/civilization that lives somewhere else in the universe. (Of course this begs the question of how that lifeform evolved, but anyway... ;-> )
A professional philosopher who was a non-theist but who was also scathingly critical of Darwinism - because of its many illogical and contra-evidentiary assertions - was the late Dr. David Stove, author of the brilliant book Darwinian Fairytales. You can read some excerpts of his book at these links: So You Think You Are a Darwinian? and A New Religion. All sample articles, including some responses to Dr. Stove, are at the Royal institute of Philosophy site.
If by “creationist” you mean “biblical creationist” then “creationist, but is not a Christian” seems to me to be unlikely on the face of it as a final result, both logically and given the debates and information out there these days. I.e., there are all the other biblical claims one would be under intellectual pressure to accept once one accepted the Genesis creation account.
So I think in the long-run most who accept Genesis, as opposed to just religion-neutral Intelligent Design - would most likely end up becoming full-fledged Christians. But I’m sure there are a goodly number who, like C.S. Lewis at one point and possibly like Prof. Flew, are currently ‘on the way’ to full belief but at this time have only gotten as far as deism or theism.
Thanks for the interesting question!
Cheers!
GKC_fan
Interesting.
Why would God want Genesis written if it was not true? Not that I expect you to be able to think like God, just want your opinion.
I didn’t say it wasn’t true. I accept God’s Truth is subtle and exists on many levels. That’s why people can read their Bibles their whole life and still find new things in it.
If there was one literal meaning you could read it once and put in the shelf and not need to go back to it again.
It’s not a history book, not a science book, it is God’s multipurpose tool.
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