[JoeFromSidney]

I completely reject young earth creationism. It simply isn't consistent with other things that we know from many different fields of science.

Having said that, I'm puzzled by these goings-on. Did he in fact find soft tissue in bones that should have been completely fossilized? That is, tissue that hadn't become fossilized? That's a crucial issue, but it seems to have become lost in the debate over his alleged religious beliefs. If true, it's an important scientific finding, with lots of implications for what we think we know about biology, chemistry, and a lot of other things.

Finally, I'm disturbed that researchers were digging up bones only to break them. Surely there are better ways of getting samples from their interiors than destroying the bones. Doesn't sound like good science to me.

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Did he in fact find soft tissue in bones that should have been completely fossilized? That is, tissue that hadn’t become fossilized?

From CBS News Local:

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/07/24/scientist-alleges-csun-fired-him-for-discovery-of-soft-tissue-on-dinosaur-fossil/

EXCERPT:

While at the Hell Creek Formation excavation site in Montana, researcher Mark Armitage discovered what he believed to be the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed at the site, according to attorney Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute.

Upon examination of the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Dacus says Armitage was “fascinated” to find soft tissue on the sample – a discovery Bacus said stunned members of the school’s biology department and even some students“because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago.”

[SeekAndFind]

You can find an abstract of the paper Mark Hollis Armitage wrote here:

http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235646829_Soft_sheets_of_fibrillar_bone_from_a_fossil_of_the_supraorbital_horn_of_the_dinosaur_Triceratops_horridus

TITLE:

Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus.

Department of Biology, California State University, 18111 Nordhoff Street, Northridge, CA 91330-8303, USA. Electronic address: . Acta histochemica (Impact Factor: 1.61). 02/2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.acthis.2013.01.001

[Ha Ha Thats Very Logical]

It's worth keeping in mind what the "soft tissue" they find in dinosaur bones actually is. YECs like to portray it as though they found dinosaur steak. But all they really find is tiny fragments of something like collagen. From the abstract of Armitages paper:

...numerous small sheets of lamellar bone matrix. This matrix possessed visible microstructures consistent with lamellar bone osteocytes. Some sheets of soft tissue had multiple layers of intact tissues with osteocyte-like structures featuring filipodial-like interconnections and secondary branching.... Filipodial extensions were delicate and showed no evidence of any permineralization or crystallization artifact and therefore were interpreted to be soft.

So sure, "soft tissue," but a long long way from 66-million-year-old meat.