Soft Tissues in Dinosaur Bones
From SkepticWiki
[edit] Introduction
Soft tissues and blood vessels have been discovered inside the bones of dinosaurs, much to the surprise of paleontologists. [1].
The discovery was originally reported in Schweitzer MH, Wittmeyer JL, Horner JR, Toporski JK (2005) Soft-Tissue Vessels and Cellular Preservation in Tyrannosaurus rex, Science 307(5717):1952-1955.
[edit] Creationist arguments
The initial reaction of creationists was simply their usual pretense that anything which surprises biologists must contradict the theory of evolution. Of course, there is nothing in the theory of evolution which suggests that soft tissues should not have been preserved. The reason why it was surprising to find soft tissue in a dinosaur femur was that no-one had ever done so previously. To quote Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies:
It has always been thought that cells couldn't be preserved, but there really wasn't any evidence to back up those ideas, other than no one having found cellular preservation before. [2]
This requires creationists to think of some reason why these soft tissues should contradict some aspect of science that they dislike. They have hit on radiometric dating. The argument goes: soft tissues can't be preserved for 70 million years, therefore the fossil, and by implication all other fossils, aren't really that old.
No creationist can give a better reason for why soft tissue can't be preserved for 70 million years except the Argument from Incredulity. They know, after all, that soft tissue tends to rot if left long enough.
What they overlook is that soft tissue does not rot all by itself; this requires the presence of bacteria. No bacteria --- no rot.
Creationists are quite unable to supply a mechanism which would leave soft tissues unrotted for 4000 years after Noah's flood (when most of them suppose that fossilization took place) but would rot them after longer periods. Either there were bacteria present inside the femur which could rot the soft tissue, or there weren't. If there were, it would have rotted in considerably less than 4000 years. If there weren't it wouldn't have rotted over any period of time.
