T-Rex and the Carbon 14 Dating Controversy
Scientists tell us that Dinosaurs lived up until about 65 million years ago, when an asteroid about 6 miles across, slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The asteroid may have happened, but it certainly did not kill off all the dinosaurs. This paper will make the case that Dinosaurs survived well into the early Holocene based on 14c tests of non-fossilize dinosaur bones, (including T-Rex and similar sized dinosaurs) showing the results of more than 60 'blind' 14c tests in major worldwide laboratories which returned dates between 12,000 YBP and 42,000 YBP. We will discuss in detail the discovery of Dr. Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State and her discovery of 'collagen and hemoglobin element' in a T-Rex hind limb.
Photo was taken at the Museum of Natural Science, Milano, Italy by Stefano Bolognini, Nov, 2009.
Soft Tissue from a T-Rex Dinosaur?
The following is NOT all my own original material, though it substantially follows my personal research. Extracted from an article by Brad Harrub, PhD - and other printed publications, papers and materials.
It is not a secret that DNA cannot stand up to harsh environmental factors such as heat or intense pressure.
Additionally, we know that the molecular structure of DNA begins to break down rapidly after an organism dies. Scott Woodward and his colleagues observed: “Nucleic acids have limited life expectancies under physiological conditions, and DNA is particularly susceptible to oxidative and hydrolytic damage” (Woodward, et al., 1994, p. 1229). This rapid degradation was one of the arguments the defense used to discount the blood evidence in O.J. Simpson’s famous double-murder trial.
It was also the picture painted in the famous movie Jurassic Park. Moviegoers learned that DNA could not sustain the test of time—but blood-sucking insects preserved in amber still possessed usable DNA.
And from that people began to speculate: “Could we create a living dinosaur from DNA?” That question has been recast into the spotlight as researchers made an amazing announcement. The Washington Post reported:
Soft tissue found within a dinosaur bone!? How could that be? “For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus Rex” (Schmid, 2005, emp. added).
In a Science article titled “Tyrannosaurus Rex Soft Tissue Raises Tantalizing Prospects,” Erik Stokstad commented: “On page 1952, the team led by Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University in Raleigh describes dinosaur blood vessels— "still flexible and elastic after 65 million years—and apparently intact cells” (2005, 307:1852). In the opening abstract of their report, Schweitzer and her colleagues remarked:
“Soft tissues are preserved within hind limb elements of Tyrannosaurus Rex (Museum of the Rockies specimen 1125). Removal of the mineral phase reveals transparent, flexible, hollow blood vessels containing small round micro structures that can be expressed from the vessels into solution.
Some regions of demineralized bone matrix are highly fibrous, and the matrix possesses elasticity and resilience. Three populations of micro structures have cell-like morphology. Thus, some dinosaur soft tissues may retain some of their original flexibility, elasticity, and resilience." (2005, 307:1952, parenthetical item in orig.).”
The authors go on to disclose that this Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen was discovered “at the base of the Hells Creek Formation, 8m above the Fox Hills Sandstone” (307:1952). They estimated the creature’s age at approximately 18-years-old. However, the fascinating part of this report was in the pictures. Schweitzer and her colleagues included over 20 microscopic images of the soft tissue that was recovered from the dinosaur bone.
Schweitzer and her colleagues carried out an experiment in which they applied a weak acid to demineralize the dinosaur bone. They observed:
“After 7 days, several fragments of the lining tissue exhibited unusual characteristics not normally observed in fossil bone. Removal of the mineral phase left a flexible vascular tissue that demonstrated great elasticity and resilience upon manipulation. In some cases, repeated stretching was possible.” (307:1954).
In a personal communication, Schweitzer discussed the serendipitous way in which the material was discovered. The Washington Post account mentioned that the bone was broken when it was moved, which permitted access to the soft tissues. When asked if that was, indeed, true, Mary Schweitzer responded: “Yes and no. It was broken in the field—too heavy for the helicopter in one piece. But that only allowed access to the bone chunks they didn’t need to ‘rehabilitate’ the dino. The soft tissues were not immediately apparent or expected” (Harrub, 2005, emp. in orig.). By having more than one piece, Schweitzer and her colleagues were able to get a better view of the internal aspects of the bone.
Expected or not, the end result has opened a chasm of questions. Scientists are questioning how this soft protein material can be so fresh when it was discovered in “70 million year old bones.” Maybe the question they should be asking is: “Are we sure these bones are so old, given that they contain such fresh proteins and elastic soft tissue?” In the conclusion of their report, Schweitzer and her colleagues noted:
“However, we demonstrate the retention of pliable soft-tissue blood vessels with contents that are capable of being liberated from the bone matrix, while still retaining their flexibility, resilience, original hollow nature, and three-dimensionality.... This T. Rex also contains flexible and fibrillar bone matrices that retain elasticity” (307:1955).
This scientific evidence does not hold up under typical dinosaur age timelines.
In the description of one of the images included in the report the authors observed: “Round red microstructures within the vessels are clearly visible” (307:1953). The report in Science News further proclaimed: “The researchers squeezed round, microscopic structures out of the presumed T. rex blood vessels. Those small spheres, which ranged from dark red to deep brown, may be red blood cells, says Schweitzer.” (Perkins, 2005, 167:195). When asked if the contents of the blood vessels were indeed blood cells, Schweitzer gave a carefully guarded answer. She stated:
“I don’t know what any of it is until I do tests. I have been in paleontology enough to know that just because something looks like something we recognize does not mean that it is” (Harrub, 2005, emp. in orig.) –‘a wise response, given the negative response from the scientific community to her 1997 discovery in which she mentioned blood cells from dinosaur tissue. In that article she described the moment in the laboratory in which it became apparent:
“The lab filled with murmurs of amazement, for I had focused on something inside the vessels that none of us had ever noticed before: tiny round objects, translucent red with a dark center. Then a colleague took one look at them and shouted, ‘You’ve got red blood cells. You’ve got red blood cells.” (Schweitzer and Staedter, 1997, p. 55).
The colleague that “took one look” was University of Montana professor, “Dinosaur Jack” Horner, one of America’s best-known paleontologists, who discovered his first dinosaur fossil when he was eight years old. So in the past it was red blood cells. But now we have soft tissue—including blood vessels!
Iron-clad "Dinosaur-era" tissue from "70-million year old" Mosasaur:
In this peer-reviewed report by researchers including from Lund University in Sweden and Southern Methodist University in Dallas, scientists confirm another biological tissue discovery using sophisticated techniques to rule out modern contamination, bio-film, etc., concluding that original biological collagen exists in a small bone from an extinct marine reptile called a Mosasaur. Yet according to a report in Science Magazine as it relates to the discoveries of dinosaur tissue, scientists calculate the maximum survival time of collagen not in millions but in thousands of years.
More Soft Dinosaur Tissue, Now from an "80 Million" Year Old Hadrosaur:
According to Nat'l Geographic, there's yet another discovery of soft tissue in a dinosaur, this time, a Hadrosaur, with soft blood vessels, connective tissue, and blood cell protein amino acid chains partially sequenced at Harvard University. This allegedly 80-million year-old non-fossilized duck-billed dinosaur tissue was discovered by a team led by researchers at North Carolina State University. Harvard, et al., wanted to get some soft dinosaur tissue so they put together a team and just went out and found some.
Consider all the potential soft tissue, and perhaps even DNA, lost to humanity because of secular universities ignoring outside claims of a false evolutionary timescale (65 million year old extinction of dinosaurs) which has so biased paleontologists that they would never even look for non-decomposed original biological tissue inside of dinosaur bones.
For decades these kinds of announcements have been mostly just ignored because of the old-earth evolutionary assumptions. But now that original dinosaur tissue has been repeatedly confirmed, the existence of biological material and even living bacteria in allegedly million-year-old specimens should be acknowledged and re-assessed.
As listed by Dr. Walt Brown…
- Allegedly 17 million year old magnolia leaf contains DNA (Scientific American 1993)
- Allegedly 18 million year old salamander muscle and vessels filled with blood (Proc. Roy. Soc. 2009)
- Allegedly 40 million year old bee fossil contains LIVING bacteria (Science 1995)
- Allegedly 120 million year old insect fossil contains DNA (Nature 1993)
- Allegedly 200 million year old fish fossil contains DNA (Science. News 1992)
- Allegedly 400 million year old fish amino acids (Journal of Applied Genetics 2003).
- Allegedly 600 million year old rock contains LIVING bacillus (Nature 2000).
Biological Material from a "150-Million" Year Old Archaeopteryx:
One would think that these "dinosaur-era" finds would be trumpeted as the scientific discovery of our age. But as late as 2012, so many evolutionists whom we talk to at RSF:
- Have never even heard of these developments
- Initially deny them (soft-tissue deniers)
- Assume that it must be creationists who found the sample, repeating the debunked claims that these are not dinosaur tissue but bacterial biofilm contamination.
- Now the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports the discovery of various types of original biological material in archaeopteryx feathers and bones that allegedly has survived for 150 million years.
The New Scientist report, "Soft tissue remnants discovered in Archaeopteryx,” put it:
‘It boasts more than just...impressions of long-gone feathers. One of the world's most famous fossils...Archaeopteryx – also contains remnants of the feathers' soft tissue. ... "It's amazing that that chemistry is preserved after 150 million years."
Paleontologists had long thought that only impressions remained. [But] "There is soft-tissue chemistry preserved in places that people didn't expect it," says geochemist Roy Wogelius. [RSF: Not enough biological material was discovered to call it tissue but only remnants of tissue.]
Carbon-14 found everywhere it’s not supposed to be
(even in "dinosaur era" fossils):
C-14 decays in only thousands of years and therefore cannot last for millions. Thus evolutionists did not expect to find C-14 EVERYWHERE it shouldn't be if the earth were old (Answers, 2011). Carbon-14 is found in coal, oil, limestone, fossil wood, graphite, natural gas, marble, dinosaur fossils, and even in supposedly billion-year-old diamonds! A secondary assumption by old-earth scientists proposed that the C-14 in diamonds (coal, etc.) must have come from C-13 and neutron capture. Calculations can falsify this claim as Dr. Jonathan Sarfati argues, for scarce crustal radioactivity could explain less than one 10,000th of the C-14 in diamonds, and similarly, there would have to be thousands of times more uranium, thorium, etc. throughout the earth's crust everywhere that these globally dispersed materials are found.)
That Mosasaur (above), shown by researchers to have original biological material and not contamination, also contained five percent modern carbon. Radiocarbon also exists even in supposedly million-year-old two-mile deep natural gas wells (CRSQ Fall 2007): "Once again, fossil gas is not carbon-14 dead. Thus, the age of the gases is on the order of thousands, not millions of years.” See more at RSF's List of Not So Old Things and in Round Four of our debate with AronRa. C-14 in specimens supposedly millions or a billion years old is so ubiquitous that it is longer an anomaly. And while Gradualists had hoped they could attribute it to contamination, Dr. John Baumgardner, of Los Alamos National Labs has documented in Dec, 2010 Creation Matters that C-14 exists even in the hardest naturally-occurring, contamination-resistant substance on earth, within diamonds.
Summary of supporting evidence for accuracy and reliability for the significant presence of C-14 in dinosaur bones and therefore young RC ages.
Short Summary: The most obvious scientific justification for accepting the RC ages for dinosaurs in the thousands of years is the concordance of RC ages between bone collagen and bone bio-apatite. If the date for a particular specimen is questionable or controversial RC dating labs recommend that the C-14 testing be repeated on several fractions using AMS and/or on larger samples using both AMS and conventional C-14 methods. We have made such repetitive tests and we obtain dates in the 22,000-33,000 range for dinosaur bones each time a different dinosaur bone or portion of the bone was tested for C-14. For example: Triceratops collagen was 30,080 ± 200 using AMS and 33,830 +2910/-1960 using the conventional method with a large sample (See Table 1).
Further Chart of C-14 test of additional non fossilized dinosaur bones.
Conclusion to RC (C-14) Dating Dinosaur Bones
It is a really simple question, Dr. Schweitzer. "Why not AMS RC (14c) test the so-called T-Rex hind limb? It is a straight forward 'falsification' step in the process. Why will Academia not test ANY dinosaur bones that show 'elastic collagen and hemoglobin elements"? It IS being done in other parts of the world, and now with more than 360 results in Eurasia, and more than 65 results here in North America, we are reaching the threshold where Science and Academia begin to lose their credibility.
The answer has nothing to do with the long held animosity between Science and Religion, but has everything to do with the actual truth. Which is, "Dinosaur have lived on this planet for a very long time, and NOT all, although some MAY have, gone extinct 65 million years ago. In fact, some may have lived well into the mid to late Holocene.
John M. Jensen Jr.
JohnMJensenJr@gmail.com
- AncientCanalBuilders.com
- EarthEpochs.com
- Academia.edu/JohnJensen
Photos: All Photos are included under the ‘fair use’ act for non-profit, educational, or training purposes. Most are included from Government or other Public Domain sources. Private or copyright photos are attributed where possible. This online eBook is an education-research publication.
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