A vanishingly small probability. However, the soft tissue is made up of collagen, and probably other proteins as well. What's interesting is they successfully tested the tissue with something that reacts to chicken collagen:I am curious if there is any salvagable DNA, as well.
Would answer many questions.
By Menton's own formulation, birds should not be related to dinosaurs because "After all, dinosaurs are reptiles," and so he weakens his own position. Again, it is the "Supporting Online Material" that holds the even greater denunciation of Menton's creationism. It is there that we find that Schweitzer et al also prepared organic extracts from the MOR 1125 T. rex, encasing sandstone, and associated fossilized plants. They also prepared similar extracts of modern bird tissues, specifically ostrich bone, chicken bone, and chicken tendon. These extracts were tested by ELISA immunoassay against antisera for bovine osteocalcin, and chicken collagen. Osteocalcin is highly conserved (very little variation) across bony organisms, and it matters little which type is used (See Ancient Molecules and Modern Myths for further details). Not so for collagen. In the graph below, these data are summarized with negative controls from blanks, and buffers. The data have been adjusted to account for non-specific reactivity of the controls. Note also the dilution effects.
This graph is David Menton's nightmare; strong indication that there is molecular evidence that birds evolved from the dinosaurs. Notice that the two samples drawn from the fossilized femur MOR-1125 both show significant responses to x-Osteocalcin and x-chicken collagen, as do tissues from modern chickens and ostriches. Comparison to the burial matrix, and other controls that showed little to no reaction clearly demonstrates that there are protein fragments associated with the fossil bone. The ratio of collagen reaction to osteocalcin reaction contrasted between the dinosaur samples and the chicken tendon and chicken bone samples helps further fix these as bone derived protein fragments. Even though nearly every paleontologists alive feels that the fossil data relating birds and dinosaurs is already adequate, we could be looking at the molecular "smoking gun."
The potential significance of Schweitzer et al seemed totally over the head of Carl Wieland, who cheered this paper as "evidence" for a young Earth. Merton's desperate need to attack Schweitzer et al with such flatulence as, "One must assume that the standards for publication in even the most prestigious scientific journals like Science are quite different for evolution than for any other branch of empirical science," at least suggests that unlike Wieland, he is aware of the fact that this paper could presage the end of creationism's favorite argument that birds are unrelated to dinosaurs.
