The ICR article has more images on their site.
Posted on 12/11/2013 8:10:28 AM PST by fishtank
Dinosaur Soft Tissue Preserved by Blood? by Brian Thomas, M.S. *
Researchers are now suggesting that iron embedded in blood proteins preserved the still-soft tissues, cells, and molecules discovered inside dinosaurs and other fossils after the creatures were buried in sediments. The ability to justify millions of years is at stake, and this study promises to do just that. What are its merits and demerits?
Publishing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Mary Schweitzer led a team that showed how iron atoms from blood adhere to and preserve blood vessels.1 The team placed ostrich bone blood vessels in water and watched them disintegrate in less than a week. They then treated another set of ostrich blood vessels with concentrated blood, and the treated blood vessels still looked fresh after two years of sitting on the lab bench.
They postulated that iron generates chemically reactive oxy radicals that help adjacent proteins bond, preserving their overall structure in a process called cross-linking. The way a fried egg resists rotting longer than a raw, cracked egg might illustrate this effect.
“Oxy radicals also facilitate protein cross-linking in a manner analogous to the actions of tissue fixatives (e.g. formaldehyde), thus increasing resistance of these ‘fixed’ biomolecules to enzymatic or microbial digestion,” according to Schweitzer and her colleagues.1
These results are unique and compelling. But do they really justify the study authors’ claim that this iron preservation phenomenon explains how dinosaur tissues lasted for tens of millions of years?
The study authors wrote, “The HB [hemoglobin]–oxygen interactions investigated here explain both the association of iron with many exceptionally preserved fossils and the enhanced preservation of tissues, cells and molecules over deep time.”1
For an experiment to really explain an effect lasting for millions of years, shouldn’t it gather enough time-related measurements to estimate the maximum time that iron-treated soft tissues could last? Only then could researchers directly compare that maximum time with fossils’ evolutionary ages. Schweitzer’s report did not show these kinds of results.
The scientific community has long shown its desperation to defend mainstream fossil ages against the short shelf-life of soft-tissue fossils. Will they now call upon blood iron to have preserved fossils in a way that these results don’t justify?
Iron does appear to preserve tissues, even keeping blood vessels intact at room temperature for two years. Could iron keep soft tissues intact for millions of years? At least four reasons show why the study’s results, amazing though they are, answer with a clear “No.”
First, “Ostrich vessels were incubated in a concentrated solution of red blood cell lysate,” according to the study authors.1 Their procedure involved extracting and purifying iron from blood. But ancient dinosaur and other fossils did not have the advantage of scientists treating their carcasses with a blood-soup concentrate.
Second, many of the still-fresh fossil biochemicals described in the literature do not show evidence of nearby iron. For example, researchers have encountered bone cells called osteocytes locked inside dinosaur bones, including a Triceratops horn core.2 These cells have fine, threadlike extensions that penetrate the bone’s mineral matrix through tiny tunnels called canaliculi. Could concentrated blood penetrate and preserve those almost inaccessible bone cells?
Schweitzer and her coauthors think so. They wrote, “In life, blood cells rich in iron-containing HB [hemoglobin] flow through vessels, and have access to bone osteocytes through the lacuna-canalicular network.”1 Yet, the study authors did not demonstrate this supposed access, they merely asserted it.
For example, have experiments shown that canaliculi can wick blood puree, despite having tiny diameters on the order of 0.0004 millimeters? Also, how could iron-rich preservative “have access to” tiny tunnels already clogged with osteocytes? Other examples of original soft tissues without these iron particles include mummified dinosaur and lizard skin.3,4
Third, for experimental control, the Royal Society authors kept ostrich vessels in water to watch them rot.1 Does this resemble the burial conditions of dinosaurs, which are mostly dry today and have been primarily dry perhaps since the day of burial? Water accelerates tissue decay by providing for microbes and by facilitating degradative chemistry. So by adding water, these scientists may have rigged their “control” sample to show a higher-than-expected decay rate difference.
The researchers then compared their hemoglobin-soaked samples to the watered-down samples and wrote, “In our test model, incubation in HB increased ostrich vessel stability more than 240-fold, or more than 24000% over control conditions.”1 If both their control and test models used unrealistic conditions, then they dulled the edge of their entire argument.
Fourth, just because this iron increases the “resistance of these ‘fixed’ biomolecules to enzymatic or microbial digestion” does not necessarily mean that it increases resistance of these “fixed” biomolecules to degrading chemical reactions.1 In other words, these authors have again shown that iron inhibits microbes, but they did not show that it inhibits the oxidation and hydrolysis reactions known to relentlessly convert tissues into dust.
Plus, though they showed how iron ups resistance to microbes for two years, they did not show that it does so for millions of years. Getting these tissues to resist enzymes and microbes is the lowest hurdle. These results fail to demonstrate the next step—getting tissues to resist the laws of chemistry for unimaginable time spans.
While the study does show that iron helps preserve soft tissues, the results fall far short of the authors’ claim that this explains soft tissue persisting for millions of years. Concentrated blood and extra water may not approximate real conditions, iron is not always present with known original tissue fossils, and the scientists did not produce a useful time-to-dust estimate for their iron-encrusted tissues.
By showing that iron particles stuck to dinosaur blood vessels look similar to those attached to ostrich vessels, this research may explain how soft tissues have resisted disintegration for longer-than-expected intervals—for example, thousands of years.
References
Schweitzer, M. H. et al. A role for iron and oxygen chemistry in preserving soft tissues, cells and molecules from deep time. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Published online before print, November 27, 2013.
Armitage, M. H. and K. L. Anderson. 2013. Soft sheets of fibrillar bone from a fossil of the supraorbital horn of the dinosaur Triceratops horridus. Acta Histochemica.115 (6): 603-608.
Lingham-Soliar, T. and G. Plodowski. 2010. The integument of Psittacosaurusfrom Liaoning Province, China: taphonomy, epidermal patterns and color of a ceratopsian dinosaur. Naturwissenschaften. 97 (5): 479-486.
Edwards, N. P. et al. 2011. Infrared mapping resolves soft tissue preservation in 50 million year-old reptile skin. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 278 (1722): 3209-3218.
* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.
Article posted on December 11, 2013.
The ICR article has more images on their site.
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ping
read later
On the contrary, I am sure that most paleontologists, biologists, and what have you would be in favor of continuing this research.
As long as the scientific method is consistently employed, and enough evidence is subjected to it, any scientist worth his salt should embrace the resultant findings.
Regards,
While I agree with the author that science may be “reaching” to explain the anomalies of of million year old soft tissue fossils...The same anomalies still stand for a young earth...in this case six thousands years or 6 million years is the same problem...soft tissue should not survive that long....so both sides have to explain the mechanism preserving it
These scientists should be embarrashed to promote this theory with such weak evidence. They think preservation is due to radical formation but do not test whether radicals are being formed. They didnt check for characteristic molecules produced by radical reactions. They used conditions that were inappropriate for the test. The formation of radicals formed by iron requires oxygen and water, they ran tests in an oxygen free environment and water is incompatible with fossilization. The iron molecules in the tissue would eventually react with oxygen and become oxidized (rust) and become inactive thereby allowing decay. IMO their theory doesnt stand up to even even cursory examination.
Grasping at straws ping.
How about the assumptions through which they interpret their findings?
Will they question those? Will they “embrace” any conclusion that refutes their assumptions?
And how Evolutionists have to twist and bend that research to meet their preconceptions. I doubt it will be close to whatever "twist (if any)" Creationists have to do.
Thomas has written well and often on the subject of what scientific evidence shows and does not show about dino tissue preservation but he too makes hos own leaps of logic and interpretation. That dino tissue might under very rare circumstances be preserved for thousands of years it does not follow that the earth can thus be only thousands of years old or show that the earth could not have existed without life for some long period of time.
Proving the evolutionists are in error does not prove the young earth creationists correct.
Some people just don’t grasp what a million years is.
Just by looking at soil erosion rates, were the Earth just 10,000 years old, we would no longer be able to farm due to the near total loss of soil.
farm due to the near total loss of soil.....”
you mean soil is not being created or replaced, but eroded away??
interesting
Barry Setterfield has done the heavy cosmological work of showing that the Earth has to be approximately 6000 years old based on the expansion of the universe and the observed ‘quantized’ red shifts.
http://www.setterfield.org/index.html
His site is a pleasure to those without bias.
In the last few years, scientists have found a variety of dinosaur bones from around the world that are not completely fossilized. They actually contain intact protein fragments, including ones known as collagen and elastin. Amazingly, once the minerals are chemically stripped away from the soft tissue, the researchers were even able to squeeze round, dark red, microscopic structures from what was thought to be dinosaur blood vessels. However, since, according to evolutionists, “proteins in tissue normally degrade quickly after an animal dies,” this research has remained “controversial.”
Since Dr. Mary Schweitzer published her findings in 2005 and 2007 about “68-million-year-old”T. rex soft tissue, a much more thorough study has been done on a so-called “80-million-year-old fossil from a duck-billed dinosaur.” What did researchers find? This time they found “an even larger number of protein fragments.” After using “chemicals to dissolve away the minerals,” scientists have seen what appears to be “a network of soft, transparent vessels” and cells.
Any strong, marathon-running, dark-haired, fair-skinned, wrinkle-free, 20-year-old-looking, modern man who claims to be 130 years old would be discredited immediately. Science and common sense would demand that the 130-year date be rejected. But what about the dates evolutionists give us for this “young looking” dinosaur tissue—tissue that evolutionists have called “miraculously preserved”? Now that the once “controversial” dinosaur proteins have been confirmed, are evolutionists reconsidering the age of dinosaur fossils? Are evolutionists considering the possibility that dinosaurs may have lived hundreds or thousands of years ago rather than 65+ million years ago? Apparently not—at least not in their writings.
-Eric Lyons AP
Yeppers, and it could be 60-600 years.
by Kyle Butt, M.A.
In the 1930s, a man named Dr. Javier Cabrera started collecting strange stones that an ancient Indian culture had carved. Today, there are about 11,000 of these stones. They are called Ica stones because they were found in and around the city of Ica, Peru. The stones have caused quite a stir because of the carvings on some of them. They are covered with pictures of an ancient Indian culture. Many of the carved stones show ordinary, everyday scenes. But some of the carvings portray humans in close contact with dinosaurs. There are scenes of men hunting dinosaurs, riding dinosaurs, and leading them by ropes around their necks.
These stones present a big problem for the theory of evolution. According to evolution, humans and dinosaurs were separated by millions of years. Because of the dinosaur carvings on the stones, some people say that they could not have been carved by ancient Indians. Of course, that is exactly what would be expected. If evolutionists admit that the stones are really from an ancient Indian culture, that would prove that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. And it would disprove a whole lot of evolutionary teaching that has been done in the name of “science.”
There are several things about the Ica stones that help prove they are real. First, the stones show scenes from an early Indian culture. There is no other culture that anyone has studied that these scenes copy. Second, many of the stones show signs of being carved long ago. They have dirt build-up on them and look like other ancient Indian artifacts. Third, just like the Julsrud collection, many of the Sauropod dinosaurs on the stones show a row of spines or spikes on their backs. Yet modern scientists did not know these dinosaurs had spikes on their backs until the year 1992.
There is a good chance that the information about the Julsrud collection and Ica stones will never get into popular textbooks. It is not because the information is wrong. It is because it goes against evolution. If we understand the Bible, and look at all the scientific and historic evidence, then carvings like those found on the Ica stones are exactly what we would expect.
I’ve read a bit of what he has written and it is far from compelling.
Unless he was a strong, marathon-running, dark-haired, fair-skinned, wrinkle-free, 20-year-old-looking, modern man who claimed to be 20 years old.
PS: I agree with your post.
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