Nuclear Chemist Dr. Jay Wile on Dinosaur Soft Tissue and Carbon 14

Introduction of Dr. J. L. Weil and the Hidden Blessings of Virtual Speaking

Are you getting those, Terry?

Yeah, I was granting some requests, too.

OK, good. So as long as you can do it, because once I start the presentation, I'm not going to pay attention to that.

Oh, yeah, we'll take care of it from there.

OK, very good.

Shall I go ahead and introduce Dr. Weil now, Robin?

Go ahead.

Yes, please. I'm going to start recording right now.

OK.

All right, Dr. J .L. Weil holds an earned PhD in nuclear chemistry and a BS in chemistry, both from the University of Rochester. He has several awards. He has won several awards for excellence in teaching and is an internationally known speaker, having done presentations on the topics of nuclear chemistry, Christian apologetics, homeschooling, and creation versus evolution in several different countries.

He is best known for his award-winning K through 12 science textbooks designed specifically for the homeschool. Dr. Weil and his wife of more than 35 years, Kathleen, homeschooled their daughter, Dawn, from the time they adopted her until she graduated from high school.

Dawn is now a Butler University graduate and owns a specialty shipping company called Paws Logistics with her husband, James. You can learn about Dr. Weil's curriculum at the Berean Builders website. It's bereanbuilders .com.

And I'll put that into the chat. So that people can look at that later. And with that, we thank you, Dr. Weil, for joining us.

Well, it's great to be here. It's kind of one of the blessings, hidden blessings of the whole pandemic thing that people have converted over to these virtual things. And so I can speak where I normally wouldn't be able to get to.

I usually travel around doing homeschool conventions and so forth. But this year, because of the pandemic, I've gotten to speak at more homeschool conventions because they've all been virtual. So places that couldn't afford to travel to send me out there.

So that's been kind of a hidden blessing to all of this. I certainly would rather get back to normal life. And in Indiana, we're supposed to be back to normal life now. We'll see how that goes. But anyway, just my mother always told me to try and look for the hidden blessings in things.

So that's what I'm trying to do, I guess.

Dinosaur Soft Tissue in Fossils

So when Terry asked me to speak, I thought I'd speak about the things I'm really, really interested in. And there are two things that are really, really fascinating to me going on right now in the origins research field.

And so that's what I want to talk about. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here, see how this works. That's the one I want to share, I think. OK, so there we go. Hopefully, you're seeing my screen now.

And so I'm going to talk about the soft tissue and carbon -14 found in dinosaur fossils. And I have to tell you, as a nuclear chemist, the carbon -14 bit is much more important to me or much more convincing to me than the soft tissue business.

But nevertheless, both of them are really, really fascinating and very interesting and have a lot to relate to our discussions of whether the Earth is old or young or so forth. So anyway, I'm trying to see.

Oh, there we go.

So this all kind of, the soft tissue thing started back in 2005. And that's really not that long ago, especially in terms of science. It's really not that long ago, even though it was 15 years ago now.

Mary Schweitzer sort of rocked the scientific world because she had to break open a Tyrannosaurus rex femur. Now, the femur is the bone that goes from the knee to the hip. It's usually probably the longest bone in most vertebrate bodies.

And so anyway, she had to actually break it in order to get it out of what it was in. And when she broke it, she found inside some things. And one of those things looked like this picture here. And someone who knows just enough anatomy and physiology to be dangerous, like me, would look at this and say, that's muscle tissue, two globs of muscle tissue attached by a ligament.

That's certainly what it was. That's what it looks like. And now, that's not actually what it is. But to someone like me, that's what it looks like. It is tissue, but it's probably not muscle tissue. So anyway, Schweitzer publishes this paper about this and shows, in fact, that this tissue is actually soft and elastic.

She actually says you can grab both of those clumps with the forceps, pull it, and when you release, that elastic part comes back to its original size. So it can be stretched and then relaxed again,.

Just like a rubber band.

And the crazy thing about this is, this bone is supposed to be 65 million years old. And this doesn't make a lot of sense because we know that soft tissue decays really rapidly. Under normal conditions, usually less than a year.

The very chemicals that make this soft tissue up, the proteins that make this soft tissue up, we know enough about them to actually model their behavior and so forth. And models indicate that most of these proteins break down after 30 ,000 years.

So even if there were some way to preserve the tissue, after 30 ,000 years, the proteins themselves ought to be so decayed away that the tissue wouldn't be recognizable anymore. So the idea that this stuff was in bones or fossils that are supposed to be 65 million years old seemed really absurd.

But Schweitzer was convinced that this soft tissue really was a part of the original dinosaur. Now, of course, this is a real problem for anyone who wants to believe these fossils are millions of years old.

So a lot of evolutionists, and Schweitzer is an evolutionist. She's a Christian who is an evolutionist. But she believed that that's really tissue from the dinosaur. But a lot of evolutionists didn't want to believe that, because there's just no way soft tissue can be preserved that long.

So they scrambled for other explanations. And one of the common explanations at the time was, oh, this really isn't tissue. It looks a lot like tissue. But what it is is this kind of goop called biofilm that bacterial colonies leave behind once they've died away.

So the idea is this bone was sitting in something, that something got infected with bacteria really recently. And when those bacteria died, that biofilm was left behind. And you can find biofilms that look a little shinier than what was in the other picture.

But this kind of looks like that biofilm or that picture that I showed previously. So a lot of these evolutionists wanted to say, oh, well, this isn't really dinosaur tissue. It kind of looks like dinosaur tissue.

But it's really the remnants of bacteria that invaded the fossil fairly recently. And of course, Schweitzer, being a good scientist, wanted to know if that was a possibility. So she did some chemical analysis of the tissue itself and found a protein that is typical for dinosaurs, but not made by any known species of bacteria.

So that kind of eliminates the idea that it's a bacterial biofilm, because you would expect in a bacterial biofilm, the proteins left behind would be bacterial in nature.

And not vertebrate in nature.

So in the end, Schweitzer was even more convinced that this is soft tissue. Now, Schweitzer works, or not works for, but Schweitzer's sort of guiding scientist or her research advisor is a fairly famous paleontologist, famous in the scientific community, maybe not famous elsewhere.

In the scientific community, Jack Horner is a really popular character. He's a really renowned fossil hunter. And he runs a museum in Montana. And his museum owns this fossil and the soft tissue and everything, because Schweitzer was working under his guidance when she made this discovery.

Well, some creationists really wanted him to carbon -14 date this tissue. And the reason is carbon -14 dating only works on relatively young things. I'm gonna talk about this a lot more later, but the carbon -14 dating system is useless after about 60 ,000 years max.

So anything that's older than 60 ,000 years should not have any carbon -14 in it, shouldn't be carbon -14 dateable. And so a creationist group actually talked to a wealthy benefactor and convinced him to offer Jack Horner's museum $10 ,000 to simply allow them to carbon -14 date the tissue.

And Jack Horner said, no, we're not gonna do that because, quote, the spin, unquote, creationists can get off this, quote, is not going to help us, end quote. So basically, Jack Horner was afraid they would find carbon -14 in the tissue.

And if you find carbon -14 in the tissue, that means that tissue is very young. It can't be millions of years old. And he just didn't want that to happen to his tissue. And that's really sad because, honestly, even if I believed these fossils were millions of years old, I would want to do every test I could to make sure they're millions of years old because I'd certainly like to know if I'm believing something false.

So even if I believe this tissue is millions of years old, I would like to confirm that with as many tests as possible. But Jack Horner, who's the person who can make these decisions when it comes to this fossil, says absolutely not.

And I think that says something about the character of at least some, not all, but of some evolutionists who are more interested in believing their ideas than actually testing them. And please note, this $10 ,000 grant was above and beyond the cost of the test.

So the creationist group was gonna pay for the cost of the test and give the museum $10 ,000. And Jack Horner still said no. They finally, they even tried to sweeten the deal and said, okay, we've brought in some more money.

We can test that fossil and four other artifacts,.

Anything in the museum you choose.

You know, and carbon -14 dating is expensive. So museums want to carbon date things that are fairly young. And so the grant was going to give them money and give them the ability to test some things they may not have been able to afford to test.

But Horner said no, because I suppose, because he was afraid of the results. And that's really unfortunate. A scientist, any scientist, including myself, should be willing to test his or her ideas to see if they're valid.

And this would be a reasonable test to do, and he simply refused to do it. Now, since the time of Schweitzer's discovery, lots of examples of soft tissue have been found. So initially, a lot of evolutionists were very, very skeptical that this is soft tissue.

But nowadays, there's been so much soft tissue found in so many fossils that now evolutionists believe it is soft tissue, and they just believe there's some unknown chemical process that keeps this soft tissue from decaying away and or being replaced by minerals.

Here's one of the more interesting examples because it has an interesting story and some interesting follow-up that occurred later. So a group of creationists found a Triceratops horn in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana.

Now, the Triceratops horn is supposed to be 65 million years old. That's when Triceratops were supposed to have existed. And so this fossil's supposed to be 65 million years old.

And all they found was the horn.

They didn't find the whole skull. They just found the horn. And the horn by itself isn't all that useful as an individual fossil to study. So rather than preserving the fossil, what they decided to do was to destroy the mineralized part of the fossil to see if there was anything soft left behind.

I don't know if you've ever done the classic experiment, but it's an experiment I have my students do in a couple of different science books. And that is if you soak an egg in weak acid, the acid will remove the shell of the egg, but it will leave all of the tissue behind.

And since there's a membrane that surrounds the egg inside the shell, once the shell is eaten out, you have this nice flexible egg that you can see through and everything.

It's really, really cool.

Because weak acid attacks minerals, but not tissue. And so the idea was if this was just minerals, there'd be nothing left after the horn soaked in weak acid for a while. If there was soft tissue, it would remain.

And sure enough, once they soaked in the weak acid for about a month, in the end, all of the mineral components were gone, but there were strips of soft brown tissue that was recovered. So there was soft tissue in that horn as well.

Microscopic analysis was done as a part of the process.

And when they looked at the tissue under the microscope,.

They saw exactly what you expect.

Exactly.

These are called Haversian systems,.

Named after the guy.

Who first described them microscopically. This is exactly what you expect to see when you're looking at bone tissue, at least hard bone tissue, what we call compact bone. These little guys here, the little red guys, are drawings of bone cells called osteocytes.

Osteocytes are the cells that maintain the bone.

And so forth.

These cells are living and they have these little spidery extensions called filipodial extensions. And those extensions reach out to other cells so the cells can communicate to each other. And they need to communicate because the bones have to be dynamic.

If you gain weight, your bones have to add mass in order to support your new weight. If you lose weight, your bones will get rid of some mass because they don't want to waste their, the body doesn't want to waste its energy carrying around heavy bones if it doesn't need them.

So your bones adjust to changes in your body. And one way they can do that is for the cells to communicate with each other through these filipodial extensions. So this is really interesting. So the main investigator here decided to do some higher magnification work.

He used a scanning electron microscope and he came up with these, this picture. These are three bone cells. They have every characteristic of a bone cell. This little black bar here that's in the picture indicates the length of 20 millionths of a meter, 20 micrometers.

And so in that picture, a length that's equal to that black bar is a length of 20 millionths of a meter. And so these are very small, cells are very small, but they're the right size for bone cells. And they have those nice filipodial extensions which are characteristic of bone cells.

So by all hallmarks, this is a bone cell or these are bone cells in the dinosaur fossil. The investigators wrote a report, wrote a paper that was published in the secular peer review literature. And here's what they say.

The filipodial extensions were delicate and showed no evidence of any permineralization or crystallization artifact and therefore were interpreted to be soft. So what he's saying is, I can't stab these things with anything that I can feel, so I can't be sure that they're soft.

But from a microscopic standpoint, I can't see any mineralization at all, but I'm seeing these cells. And if I see cells without any mineralization, that means that I'm looking at the original cells. They're dead, but they're still soft and original.

They haven't hardened yet.

And once again, that's an incredible statement. Not only is soft tissue found in dinosaur bones, but when you go in microscopically, you actually find soft cells. And notice he's saying, even the filipodial extensions aren't mineralized.

Now look how small these filipodial extensions is. Remember that black bar is 20 millionths of a meter.

So these filipodial extensions.

Aren't even one millionth of a meter wide, and yet they haven't hardened at all. That's hard to understand if this fossil has been sitting around for 65 million years. Now, this is a pretty groundbreaking study, pretty important study.

So how did evolutionists respond? They fired the author. The study's principal investigator, Mark Armitage, was fired from his university position after the paper was published. He sued the university, and in the document that the court uses to start the lawsuit and so forth, he said one of the university officials stormed into his office after the paper was published.

And shouted, quote,.

We are not gonna tolerate your religion in this department,.

End quote.

And that was bad for the university,.

For a university official to say that.

Now, I actually spoke with Mark Armitage. I've never met him in person, but I've spoken with him on the phone several times. And he says he doesn't think the paper is what got him fired. He thinks what got him fired was, once the paper was published, the students learned that they could come down to his lab and see dinosaur cells.

And so he said he had a constant parade of students coming into his lab, asking to see the dinosaur cells. And he's more than happy to show them. He shows them the prepared slides that he made and so forth, shows them the, actually puts the slide in, lets them play around with it and so forth.

So he lets them see dinosaur cells. And he thinks this is what got him fired because the university did not want the students to be so familiar with something that is so hard to explain from an evolutionary standpoint.

Now that, of course, is just his interpretation. I don't know, but nevertheless, he thinks that's what got him fired. He was being too open with the students. And if that's true, that says something as well about the modern evolutionary movement.

So not surprisingly, the university had to settle with Mark Armitage. And of course, he can't disclose the amount of money or anything, but he got a monetary settlement. And he's used some of those funds to continue his research.

And what he's been able to do is he's been able to pull these cells out of the bone and suspend them in fluid. This is an image from his microscope of a bone cell pulled from this, pulled from the triceratops fossil, floating in water.

So this is a soft bone cell. And that dark circle that's sort of in the upper right hand or the right-hand side, middle of the cell, that's probably the nucleus. And there's probably DNA in there. So it's really, really exciting to think we've got a soft cell, isolated, floating around in liquid.

And he's got several.

I'm gonna give you a link in a minute where you can see some of this stuff. And it's really quite incredible. So that's really exciting, the fact that we seem to be able to have actual soft cells from a dinosaur.

He's found lots of other things as well. This is another microscopic image from him. And this is a blood vessel, the sort of clear 2B thing is the blood vessel. All the other stuff is stuff that comes from the detritus and so forth in the fossil.

Now, when you look under a microscope, you can see things that look like this a lot. Fungi often look like this. There are certain types of hair can look like this. There are all sorts of things that can look like this.

So just this image itself isn't enough to say, oh, that's a blood vessel. But there are tests you can do. There are certain chemicals you can add to your sample and those chemicals will change color or glow depending on the chemicals that are found in there.

And he's done these tests. And this structure responds exactly as you would expect a blood vessel to respond and not the way you would expect any of these other things.

That kind of look similar.

So he's not just saying this looks like a blood vessel. He's saying, I've tested this and it's a blood vessel. And it's from a dinosaur fossil that's supposed to be millions of years old. This was a thing when I saw his presentation and I saw this, I audibly gasped when I saw this.

He has actually isolated vein valves from these blood vessels. If you don't know what a vein valve is, blood is pressurized in the arteries, but it's not heavily pressurized in the veins. And so it's possible for blood to flow backwards in the veins because the pressure is so low.

And that would be very, very bad. So your veins have valves in them and they only open when the blood's flowing one way. So when the blood's flowing the proper way in this diagram up, the vein valve opens and allows the blood to flow through.

If the blood tries to flow backwards, the vein valve closes to keep the blood from flowing backwards. Now, I have tried to do dissections and find vein valves. And I'm not a great dissector, but nevertheless, I've never ever seen a vein valve.

They're incredibly delicate. However, if you're a really good microscopist and you're working with recently dead things, you can generally find them. And this is what they look like under the microscope.

So here we're looking on top of a vein valve. This is the diagram on the left is a side view. Here we're looking straight down. So the vein valve is mostly circular, little oval, and that little thin sort of looks like glass or plastic.

That's the covering of the valve. And that covering opens when the blood's flowing in the right direction, closes when it's flowing in the wrong direction. And this vein valve, the tissue there that's covering this valve, very, very delicate.

Well, I audibly gasped when he showed he found those in his dinosaur fossil. So on the left and on the right, you see two vein valves that have been isolated from the vein. On the left, the vein valve, the covering is open.

It kind of looks like tent flaps opening. That's how the vein valve opens. On the right side, it looks like the tissue's been damaged because it looks like there's a hole in the vein and the tissue's not there, and there's the vein valve and the tissue's not there anymore.

But like I said, I've tried to see these in dissection specimens that are, you know, have only been dead a year or so, and I can't find them. But he was able to find them in fossils that's supposed to be millions of years old.

That's crazy. These things are so delicate. I tear them apart just trying to isolate them. He has found them in something that's supposed to be millions of years old. Hard to believe. He's also found the remnants of nerve cells as well.

A nerve cell has a very specific structure. There's a cell body that contains the nucleus and a lot of the, most of the organelles and so forth. And there are dendrites that bring signals into the cell body.

But the longest part of the cell body, of the cell usually, is the axon. And the axon carries the signal away from the cell body. And the longest cells in your body are nerve cells because these axons can be very, very long.

In order to help the signal travel quickly, there's this thing called the myelin sheath that basically allows the signal to jump from one end of the myelin sheath to the next. So each one of these segments of the myelin sheath, the signal can basically jump from one end of the segment to the next.

Well, sure enough, looking at his dinosaur fossil, he's found those as well. The little blue arrows there are the ends of the segments of the myelin sheath. And once again, it's not just a tube that's sitting there and looks like a nerve cell.

Once again, there are specific microscopic tests you can do to make sure this is really the axon from a nerve, and those tests indicate that it is. So once again, these are all very, very delicate things, and he has found them in various dinosaur fossils that are supposed to be millions of years old.

I encourage you to actually go to his website. His group is called the Dinosaur Soft Tissue Research Institute. And on his website, he has all sorts of his research up, and it's dstri, dinosaursoftissueresearchinstitute .org.

He's got three peer-reviewed papers that he's written that show his results, and two of them have images of his isolated dinosaur cells. And also you can watch videos of a presentation he gave at Lower Columbia College, and in those videos, he shows you step-by-step how he knows the structure I showed that he identified as a blood vessel really is a blood vessel, and how that structure identified as an axon really is an axon.

So he shows you the microscopic tests he does in order to do that.

So it's really cool.

He also has a YouTube channel that has other videos on it. There's this one video, I found it so fascinating, I posted it on my blog, where he's actually flipping, he's using the coverslip on a slide to flip a soft cell around in the fluid.

And it's just really cool to see this soft cell just flipping around and so forth, and think, this is a dinosaur cell, but it's so soft, it's floppy. So anyway, I think he's done some really, really interesting stuff that's showing the importance of soft tissue in dinosaur bones.

And please understand, this isn't a couple of isolated instances. It's not like this is just something you find in one or two dinosaur bones. It's incredibly common. To try and figure out how common it is, a group of paleontologists took poorly preserved dinosaur bones from a museum, and just to look to see if they could find any soft tissue.

These had been sitting in the museum for a while, and here's how one of the investigators described it. He says, quote, they're very scrappy individual broken bones. I can't even tell you what dinosaur they come from, end quote.

So these are not well-preserved dinosaur bones at all. Yet, in a couple of those bones, not all of them, but in a couple of those bones, they found what looked like red blood cells, that's the picture on the left, and proteins, that's the picture on the right.

So in the end, once again, soft tissue from scrappy, broken bones, it seems to be soft tissue is incredibly common in dinosaur fossils. And we have truly reached the limit of absurdity here because the oldest fossil that we know has soft tissue has an age of 550 million years.

This worm fossil is supposed to be 550 million years old, yet it has original soft tissue in it. The tissue hasn't decayed and it hasn't been fossilized. It's still soft. They did basically the same thing Armitage did.

They used an electron microscope to look for mineralization and they couldn't find it. Here's what they say, quote, minerals have not replicated any part of the soft tissue and the carbonaceous material of the wall is primary.

Primary means it hasn't changed. It's what it was originally. Preserving the original layering of the wall, its textures and fabrics. And by fabrics, they're mostly talking about proteins there. So in the end, if you want to believe the standard geological story, you've got to come up with some unknown method by which soft tissue can be preserved without being mineralized and without decaying for 550 million years.

Now, this is not my chemistry. I'm not a protein chemist, but I know enough chemistry to know there's no known chemical process by which this can happen. By all known chemical processes, there's no way this soft tissue can last.

For 550 million years.

So if these ages are really true, there's some exotic unknown chemical mechanism that's keeping this tissue preserved. Now, I find this fascinating. I find this stuff really fascinating. And I think for the average person or even the average scientist, this is the most graspable.

We understand that soft tissue shouldn't exist for this long, but nevertheless, it does. However, what I find even more convincing is the significant amount of carbon -14 you find in dinosaur bones. That's something as a nuclear chemist that is positive evidence that these things are young, thousands of years old, not millions of years old.

So creationists for years have been asking evolutionists to do some carbon -14 testing of dinosaur bones. The reason? Carbon -14 has a fairly short half-life, at least as most radioisotopes used in dating go.

In the end, it decays by a half-life of 5 ,700 years. After roughly 10 half-lives, there's so little of a radioisotope left that it becomes almost impossible to detect. No matter how much you start with, if you cut it in half 10 times, it gets so small that it's very, very hard to detect.

So after about 10 half-lives, you don't expect to find any of any radioactive isotope remaining. Since carbon -14's half-life is 5 ,700 years, 10 times that is 57 ,000 years. So the theoretical limit for carbon -14 dating is about 60 ,000 years.

If something's 60 ,000 years or older, it is generally not carbon dated because carbon -14 dating shouldn't be possible for such a structure. And but nevertheless, creationists have been year for years asking, let's carbon -14 date some dinosaur bones.

If you're right, we won't find any carbon -14. If we're right, we're gonna find a lot of carbon -14. But of course, like Jack Horner, most evolutionists didn't wanna do that test. Now they will say it's because they didn't wanna waste the money.

They know there's no carbon -14 in there, so why bother to carbon -14 date? The other reason you may not wanna carbon -14 date a dinosaur bone is shown in the picture there. You don't wanna carbon -14 date the outer part of the dinosaur bone.

That's subject to contamination. So what do you have to do? You have to cut into the dinosaur bone and you have to take something from inside. And cutting into a dinosaur bone, destroying a dinosaur bone like that, or at least harming a dinosaur bone like that, is really, really not looked on very favorably because dinosaur bones are pretty rare.

This would be like crushing a Ming Bay vase to try and find out what the ceramic is. But nevertheless, creationists eventually were able to raise enough funds to go searching for dinosaur fossils. This is a Triceratops femur that they found.

And they had enough money to extract samples and send those samples out to a carbon -14 dating site, dating lab, to carbon -14 dating. And not surprisingly, every bone they tested had significant amounts of carbon -14 in it, every bone.

So this is a Acrocanthosaurus fossil, supposed to be 100 million years old. Now, they didn't tell the carbon -14 dating facility that they're dating something that's 100 million years old because the dating facility would have said,.

We wouldn't do it.

They just said, this is a bone, this is a femur, this is an extraction from a femur, we'd like you to date it. And it came back with a carbon -14 date of somewhere between 23 ,760 and 30 ,640 years. Now, if this were millions of years old, the result would have been, I can't date this because I can't find any carbon -14.

But they found plenty of carbon -14, enough to make it look like it's only 24 ,000 to 30 ,000 years old. And once again, this is confirmation more of the creationist view. Now, I don't think these numbers are right.

I don't think the carbon -14 dating system works for dates much older than 3 ,000 years or so. However, it shows that these can't be millions of years old because if they were millions of years old, there wouldn't be any carbon -14 dating of it at all.

And there would be no carbon -14 date. A Triceratops fossil, supposed to be 65 million years old, carbon date somewhere between 24 and 39 ,000 years old. In fact, eight dinosaur fossils from various locations around the world were tested.

And they had so much carbon -14 in them that none of them could have been more than 39 ,000 years old according to the carbon -14 dating method. Not a single sample tested as expected by evolutionists.

Well, evolutionists would expect to see no carbon -14 at all. And to me, this is really, really striking evidence that these bones are young, because at least with soft tissue, I can at least say, okay, maybe there's some unknown chemical mechanism by which this happens.

There's no way to explain how carbon -14 hangs around for millions of years. There's just no way to do that. So how do evolutionists respond to this? Well, remember, in order to do these carbon -14 dates, you have to send them out to a lab that specializes in it, because it takes a particle accelerator.

Most creationists don't have a particle accelerator. It takes special training to be able to prepare the sample and so forth. So in the end, you send this to a specialty lab, you pay the specialty lab, and the specialty lab gives you the results.

That facility now refuses any samples that the creationists sent. CAIS is the facility that was doing the carbon -14 dating. And remember, the creationists were paying them for this service. And here's an excerpt from a letter they sent to the creationists.

The scientists at CAIS and I are dismayed by the claims you and your team have made with respect to the age of the earth and the validity of biological evolution. Consequently, we are no longer able to provide radiocarbon services in support of your anti-scientific agenda.

Now, it's very interesting that they use the phrase anti-scientific agenda, because what's more scientific? Asking for more tests to be done on something that's not explainable or just refusing to do the tests?

It would seem to me that even if I believe these bones are millions of years old, then I've got to come up with an explanation as to why there's carbon -14 in them. I've got to do that if I really believe they're millions of years old.