Dinosaur Soft Tissue

Dinosaur Soft Tissue as Evidence for a Recent Global Flood

What is this material that Dr. Schweitzer found inside a dinosaur bone in 2005? Why was it reported on 60 Minutes, NBC News, BBC, and other news outlets around the world? When she first tried to publish this dinosaur soft tissue discovery in science journals, why did some reviewers refuse to publish her findings, stating that they were impossible and that no amount of evidence would convince them that her team really found original dinosaur tissue?

And why did the scientists who excavated these bones report that the ground had a stench of death and that the odor from the bones reminded them of the smell of cadavers? Does any of this make sense if these bones are just petrified rocks that laid in the earth for over 67 million years?

Surely there's a better explanation. Perhaps these bones were not buried 67 million years ago. If an enormous watery catastrophe recently buried these creatures under tens of feet of mud just thousands of years ago, could the worldwide flood described in the Bible be the correct explanation?

Stay tuned to find out. Did you know that Dr. Schweitzer's mainstream discovery that hit the news in 2005 is just the tip of the iceberg? Hundreds of secular scientists from around the world have published over 120 science articles describing original biomaterials from dinosaurs and other ancient creatures throughout the geologic column since 1954.

And it's not just one type of soft tissue or biochemical they're finding, but 16 different varieties, including blood vessels, red blood cells, hemoglobin, osteocytes, ovalbumin, chitin, unmineralized bone, collagen, chromosomes, skin pigments, fex proteins, histone, keratin, and elastin.

The most recent two discoveries are cartilage and even nerve cells from Triceratops. What's so amazing about these findings is that the entire paleontology field, with thousands of scientists, completely missed these original short-lived biomaterials.

Why? Because they simply believed they were just hardened rocks based on their millions of years' worldview.

Scientific Skepticism About Dinosaur Soft Tissue

Derek Briggs is curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Peabody Museum at Yale University. So along comes Mary Schweitzer and she's starting to look inside dinosaur bones and has made this startling discovery about the presence of red blood cells.

What was your initial reaction to that?

Oh, I think the same reaction as everybody's, that this was totally improbable. She perhaps misinterpreted the evidence or was exaggerating the potential for what she.

Was seeing.

So skeptical at first.

Oh yeah, definitely.

Why do you think it didn't occur to anybody?

Because we have this clear understanding that part of all biological cycles involves decay. I mean, nature is set up to break down that material and recycle it. So it's just improbable that those kinds of very delicate structures would survive, particularly for millions of years.

When you think about it, the laws of chemistry and biology and everything else that we know say that it should be gone. It should be degraded completely. This is not possible. Do it again. We got another piece of bone, we put it in the solution, we waited two or three or four weeks, looked again, more blood vessels.

We must have repeated that with probably 17 or 18 different fragments of bone.

The Argument from Biomaterials and the Failure of Deep Time

Their logic runs something like this. Only minerals, not biomaterials, can last millions of years. Fossil bones are millions of years old. Therefore, fossil bones are only minerals, not biomaterials. In light of the new overwhelming evidence, a totally different argument has started to sway some experts.

Only minerals, not biomaterials, can last millions of years. All sorts of fossils, from all depths and continents, still have biomaterials. Therefore, all sorts of fossils, at all depths, and on all continents are not millions of years old.

Now that researchers have thoroughly established over the last 20 years that these soft tissues exist, has the secular field of paleontology changed their minds? Have they moved the time bracket for when these creatures lived and died?

Not at all.

Instead, they've gone through desperate attempts to imagine ways to extend the lifespan of these soft tissues to millions of years rather than reconsidering the timeline. What could possibly drive a belief system like this?

One where just 20 years ago, 100 out of 100 secular scientists would not expect to find dinosaur soft tissue, but then when they find it, try to explain it away by inventing preservation mechanisms that could possibly make them last for millions of years?

Possible rescuing devices like iron preservation have even been loaded into mainstream dinosaur movies where characters stated, did you know the soft tissue is preserved because the iron in the dinosaur's blood generates free radicals?

And those are highly reactive. So, the proteins in the cell membranes get all mixed up and act as a natural preservative. DNA can survive for millennia that way. This iron preservation idea has long since been debunked because the experiments used purified and concentrated hemoglobin, a product found nowhere in nature.

And dinosaur bones don't contain enough iron to even start the preservation process. Even if iron somehow defied the laws of thermodynamics to preserve dinosaur blood vessels, what about the 15 other varieties of soft tissue?

Let's take a closer look at just one of these soft biomaterials, collagen, which is the main structural protein found in animal connective tissue. It also makes up about 35 of bones. Numerous studies have investigated how long collagen can last before it breaks down.

While most estimates are just thousands of years, some have placed the absolute theoretical maximum life of collagen between 300 ,000 and 900 ,000 years under the best possible conditions. Either way, with a maximum shelf life of less than 1 million years, what's collagen doing in dinosaur bones that are supposedly over 67 million years old?

The Morrison Formation and the Case for a Global Flood

So, what really happened to the dinosaurs? Well, the obvious answer lies in the middle of America, where 13 states are filled with dinosaur remains mixed with marine and plant life. What event in history could bury birds, land animals, sea creatures, and plants over a 1 million square mile landscape under tens to hundreds of feet of mud?

Just look at the early flood deposit, the Morrison Formation, that covers 700 ,000 square miles and incorporates 13 states. This formation alone is over 300 feet deep and is filled with millions upon millions of dead land and sea creatures.

Just look how this formation stacks up against a 747 jet and the Empire State Building. And remember, this formation stretches across 13 states. If there was a worldwide flood that lasted about a year, we would expect all the dinosaur species in North America to be buried together at the same time and in the same regions.

And this is exactly what we find. Just look at where all the Jurassic Allosaurus, Sauropods, and Stegosaurus are buried in America. Same areas, same time, same event. Can there be any doubt that a worldwide catastrophic flood would be necessary for this to occur?

The Morrison Formation alone has 37 genera of dinosaurs that all bodied at the same time, and they are sandwiched between multiple layers of stratified mud tens to hundreds of feet thick, which is exactly what tsunamis caused from catastrophic plate tectonics would create.

An asteroid that landed thousands of miles away could not do this because these creatures are buried under tens and sometimes hundreds of feet of layered mud. But it's not just mud, they're also buried in sand and ash.

Genesis, Plate Tectonics, and Catastrophic Burial

This is where the biblical flood comes in. Genesis states that all of the fountains of the great deep broke open on the same day when the flood commenced. Bible interpreters tie this verse to oceanic rifting that occurred where Earth's crust fractured into continental and oceanic plates.

The rifting spread over 40 ,000 miles around the globe. Some rifts spread apart as molten material rose up from great depths. Geodynamic modeling shows how this process quickly pushed the continents apart.

Newly formed seafloor subducted under the edges of continents, for example, along the west coast of the Americas. Hot new seafloor sank beneath less dense continental granites. Subduction dragged granite down until it snapped back up.

Each time it snapped, it shoved water up. Colossal tsunamis carried mud, sand, and debris onto the land, burying the dinosaurs, birds, and shark teeth together in the layers we find them today. This subduction also explains why many of these dinosaur regions are filled with ash.

When the newly created seafloor, like a global conveyor belt, slid down to the Earth's mantle, that great heat thrust material up through the continent's crust. Volcanoes erupted inland from the coastal areas.

Enormous volumes of ash mixed with muddy tsunamis that buried the millions of creatures we find as fossils today. The Independence Dike Swarm in Southern California is a good example of this process. It's a linear volcanic system over 300 miles long that belted out more ash than any system in North American history.

The fact that the dinosaurs are buried in a matrix of mud, sand, and ash reveals a sudden snapshot of what happened. Because they're buried in these three products, and most of their bones are found separated and even broken, the flood described in Genesis matches the power that could bury, and not that long ago.

And the soft tissues and original biochemicals we find in their bones today prove their recent demise. And this leads to what may come as an uncomfortable conclusion. The Bible is right. This means the Ten Commandments actually describe the Great Creator's expectations.

We are guilty of sin. It also means that same Creator really did become a human, die the death of a sinner, and rise from the dead, all to save us. If God judged the whole world not that long ago because of human sin, then He will judge every one of us just as He promised in His Bible.

Turn from sin. Trust Christ. Find new life in Him. Looking for answers about what the Bible teaches about creation, the fossil record, dinosaurs? Download the Genesis Apologetics app from the iTunes or Google Play stores for answers to these questions and more.