Dinosaur Soft Tissues Raise Tantalizing Questions

For the past six years curators at the Royal Tyrell museum in Alberta, Canada, have spent more than 7,000 hours preparing a remarkable dinosaur for display. (Michael Greshko, “The Amazing Dinosaur Found (Accidentally) by Miners in Canada,” National Geographic, June, 2017).

What makes this nodosaur so special, is that it was buried with a ticking clock inside.

Of course, I don’t mean it swallowed a pocket watch. Rather, initial reports indicate that it is loaded with original biological material, called soft tissues. Such tissues (mostly proteins) decay at scientifically measurable rates, which can be compared to their actual state of decay to calculate the age of the carcass.

Normal Carbon-14 dating methods do not work for dinosaurs. Since the half-life of C-14 is only 5730 years, it is only useful for dating things less than 20,000 years old. Dinosaurs are currently believed to be tens of millions of years old.

In fact, it turns out that this nodosaur is not the only specimen with soft tissues. Over the past couple of decades, scientists have found various kinds of soft-tissues in about 200 different specimens. This first came to my attention when Dr. Mary Schweitzer discovered something like marrow inside the femur of a T-Rex found in Montana. Another famous discovery is well-preserved hadrosaur skin also found in Montana.

With so many discoveries and with a quarter-century to test them and publish the results, what conclusions has science drawn? Crickets, mostly. Even this remarkable nodosaur has been in the possession of scientists for six years, but there is still no peer reviewed study of its tissues. Why not?

The answer seems pretty obvious. There is, currently, no known mechanism that could preserve soft-tissues for more than a million years, and most would have decayed within a few thousand. Such results are radically different from current assumptions about the age of dinosaurs.

So, rather than publish results that contradict current scientific consensus, many are feverishly looking for a way that these soft-tissues could be preserved tens of millions of years longer than every scientific expectation.

While a few vague proposals have been suggested, none have been proven. After all, we’re not just talking about putting something in the deep freeze. The decay rate of protein is not caused by microbes eating the tissue, it is caused by the inevitable breakdown of inherently unstable chemical bonds. Time has its way with these tissues even in a sterile environment.

If the current science were accepted at face value, would it contradict any other scientific certainties? No. Dinosaurs are still real. The fossil record still is the fossil record. The fact that fossils are buried by thousands of layers of sedimentary rock remains undisputed. The only assumption that is really challenged is the question of how fast the layers of sediment were laid down.

The story of our nodosaur remains essentially the same: On the lush, tropical plains that were then western Canada, a plant-eating nodosaur was having its last meal. This eighteen foot, three thousand-pound behemoth, covered by armored plates and with twenty inch spikes protruding from its shoulders, was well protected from assailants. But not from weather. Especially not this storm.

A flood, like we have never seen, poured torrential rains, and opened geysers. Likely earthquakes and volcanos added to the cataclysmic flooding that swept the dinosaur downstream. Carried out to sea in the river of mud, vegetation, and debris, it escaped the usual fate of waterlogged carcasses.

While most carcasses bloat and are picked clean by scavengers before falling to the bottom, this one doesn’t have a single claw or tooth mark on it. It must have been buried quickly amidst millions of tons of vegetation, sand and aggregate. Even the ever-present bacteria which should have eaten its stomach contents and internal organs were stopped in their tracks.

There it remained, undisturbed, until 2011. The only question is whether this all happened 115 million years ago, or a few thousand years ago. That’s the nature of archeology. We have no eye-witnesses to the actual events, so we make guesses and spin a story out of our assumptions.

In fact, an earlier date would not only fit the facts that we have, it also fits with volumes of cross-cultural literature detailing a world-wide flood. It wasn’t all that long ago that this was widely held. Scientists understood that every uneaten and undecayed fossil discovered must have been buried rapidly. Hence, it was scientific proof of a cataclysmic flood not unlike that described by cultures around the world.

So how could early evolutionists counter this mounting evidence? Answer: Tell a different story. Men like Charles Lyell (1797-1875) claimed that every thin layer of the earth’s crust was laid down over the course of hundreds and thousands of years.

Naturally, there was plenty of scientific objection to this new story. Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that layers of sediment with no vegetation between them, had to be laid down rapidly? In the real world, what topsoil ever remains undisturbed for centuries?

These objections still haven’t been answered by scientific proofs. But they have been muscled out of the public square by a series of court cases in the 20th century.

As recently as 1925 it was illegal to teach the new theory of evolution in our nation’s public schools. Then, an atheist teacher (John Scopes), encouraged by the ACLU, defied the law and took the state of Tennessee to court. This is the famous “Scopes Monkey Trial.” But he lost his case and the law was upheld.

Nevertheless, four decades later, the U.S. Supreme Court, through a new interpretation of the Establishment Clause, overturned those very same state laws across the nation (Epperson v. Arkansas, 1968). Twenty years after that, they went farther still. The activist court even struck down all the state laws which called for the traditional science to be given equal time as the new evolutionary theory (Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987).

In the space of 60 years, legal activists accomplished what science could not. They replaced one scientific point of view by another. Now, after roughly 50 years of evolutionary theory being taught to us as children, there are few left who question it. Many even assume that evolution has always been taught. It hasn’t.

Today the leading evolutionists refuse to call it a scientific theory. That’s not because it has become a fact. It has, rather, become a dogma. The dating of the earth’s sedimentary layers and hence, of the fossils encased in them, depends entirely on whether you accept the quick deposit theory, or the slow deposit theory. That’s what makes the discovery of our nodosaur so intriguing.

Assumptions about how fast the earth’s sedimentary layers were deposited can now be tested by the clocks that we are digging up within them. As our understanding of these clocks improve, they can only get more accurate. Who knows how all this will cause future scientists to rethink long-settled assumptions?

The truth will come out eventually. That’s the great thing about science. It is not about opinions, or consensus, or wishful thinking. It is about facts. It is about what we can know and what we can’t know. Theories may come and go, but the truth won’t change. Seek the truth and you’ll never be disappointed or threatened by the crumbling of a theory.

Furhter Reading: University settles lawsuit with scientist fired after he found soft tissue in dinosaur bones. August 11, 2017