Organic material in dinosaur bones and distraction tactics

The Darwin Deception      08.29.2013

On Monday 26th August at 21.00 BBC2’s Horizon programme broadcast a documentary called ‘Dinosaurs: The Hunt for Life’ featuring palaeontologist Dr Mary Schweitzer. Her discovery of traces of soft tissue and red blood cells in the fossilised bones of a ’68 million year old’ T Rex has fascinated creationists since the first reports in 2005 but have, as far as I know, been studiously ignored by the establishment. So, was this documentary about setting the record straight or an exercise designed to nullify and explain away inconvenient evidence?


The discoveries themselves are fascinating, and can be studied in more depth by Googling on (Mary Schweitzer dinosaur soft tissue) or similar terms. There is a useful write up on Answers in Genesis here.  The initial discovery was made when a large T Rex thigh bone had to be sawn in half as it was too big to load on to a helicopter to get it out of the desert where it had been dug up.

 A smell was noticed. Further analysis showed soft tissue with blood vessels that still retained some elasticity and contained blood cells. It was hard to suppose that this organic tissue had remained intact for 68 million years, but the idea that the bones might have only been perhaps a few thousand years old was truly unacceptable.

The documentary did not mention the age/dating problem Dr Menton and other creationists raised, that since organic tissue could hardly be expected to survive 68 million years, perhaps the dates were wrong by orders of magnitude. As Dr Schweitzer quoted a sceptical colleague saying to her, ‘I don’t care what the data says, this is impossible.’ That response would be understandable from someone who holds to millions of years as a non negotiable axiom. What do we do when faced with facts that challenge the world view we have built our lives upon? Rejection and denial are likely.


full story here