Jump to content
  • Welcome Guest

    For an ad free experience on Online Baptist, Please login or register for free

T-Rex blood cells and soft tissue


Recommended Posts

  • Members

I've seen that, and used it to put questions into the hearts of some believers in evolution.

I would ask them how long they think a red blood cell could exist in nature. Even if frozen right away, and put in the ground, I ask them how long it would last. Most will say 10,000 years gets into the impossible range. After explaining about the T-rex cells, I ask them how a warm weather animal ended up dying in a snow pack, and that snow pack staying there for millions of years.

It's a great find.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

I've just written a very long reply but then lost all of it because the forum logged me out for some reason whilst typing it! I haven't the heart type it all out again, especially as you don't very often reply to my posts in any case, so I'll give a brief summary. Here's what it's about for me:

1. What have they found?
2. How does this fit in to both young-earth and old-earth models?

Firstly, looking at the abstracts of Schweitzer's papers instead of the glammed-up press story presented, what she says she has found is fibrous structures (like vessels), fragments of bone structure (these are the pliable tissues refered to in the press), collagen (a bone molecule) and heme (part of a haemoglobin molecule). Details are in http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:17148248. The heme and collagen discoveries were in another paper that I can't be bothered to dig up again.

So whilst this is all amazing in itself, it isn't the same thing as finding a piece of flesh, which is what one might think from reading the press story about 'soft tissue'. There are no actual body or blood cells present (i.e structures with cell walls and organelles) and no DNA.

Clearly, either way, there is no issue in fitting this evidence with a young-earth model. So what about an old earth one? Well. the question isn't 'could blood cells survive in fossils that are millions of years old?', as Qwerty Guy suggests, but rather, 'could fibrous structures, fragments of bone and heme molecules survive in fossils that are millions of years old?'

Initally, I would say 'no way', because I've always been told that fossils are completely 100% mineralised- no organic matter left at all, not even a few bits of bone. But has this just been an assumption by paleontologists? If current research says there's no way bone, fibre and haem molecules could survive for millions of years no matter what the conditions, then this piece of evidence clearly does not fit at all with an old earth model. But if the persistence of these molecules isn't that well studied, then we can't say much one way or the other.

So, in summary, the evidence clearly fits better with an young-earth model. But on the other hand I wouldn't say it is the smoking gun Qwerty Guy seems to think it is.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members
I've just written a very long reply but then lost all of it because the forum logged me out for some reason whilst typing it! I haven't the heart type it all out again' date=' especially as you don't very often reply to my posts in any case, [/quote']

Hmmm, I hadn't noticed that trend, but I will do my best to give you my attention when I can. :lol:

Seriously, thanks for your response, and I wanted to say, although we disagree on a great many things, I am sure, I DO appreciate what you add to the forums and I am thankful for your perspective. I think it does a Christian good to be challenged in their assumptions.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

it is a bit of a smoking gun, and there are many smoking guns, some on their own cry out for real answers as to how the earth can be old, and others are little chips that put together make an old earth a very very long stretch.

I will post some of these, I've been meaning too, but I keep putting it off. I'll post at least 3 topics before I go to bed tonight, which is about 6 hours from now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members
Seriously' date=' thanks for your response, and I wanted to say, although we disagree on a great many things, I am sure, I DO appreciate what you add to the forums and I am thankful for your perspective. I think it does a Christian good to be challenged in their assumptions.[/quote']

Cheers, Zealyouthguy, I too have my assumptions challenged on this forum of course, by you and others, and like you say this is a good thing. But more than that, as I read and try to make sense of the Bible, it really does help to be able to see the opinions of people like you and Jerry, who clearly have years of experience and discernment. It's actually the Biblical stuff I'm mainly here for. I don't go to church and, with the exception of one close friend, have no Christians to call upon for help with reading, so this is the next best thing. Granted I don't actually contribute to the Biblical discussion much, but that's because most of it is way over my head. I don't know what all that post-trib-millennial-dispensationalist-etc-etc stuff means. :wink
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members
I will post some of these' date=' I've been meaning too, but I keep putting it off.[/quote']

As you wish, Qwerty Guy. I can't promise I'll be up for a rigorous debate on all the topics you bring up because, as I'm sure you'll agree, we've seen these debates so many times before, and there are in fact whole dedicated websites we could go to if we wanted to talk about this stuff.

What I will say about you and me is that if we can't even agree on what has been proposed, I don't see how we will ever get on to discussing what it means. This thread is a good example; you say there were actual red blood cells found in the fossil, I say there was not.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Let Mary Schweitzer, the scientist most involved with this find, take up the story of when her co-workers took turns looking through a microscope at a thin section of this T. rex bone, complete with blood vessel channels.

?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!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

I regularly debate with a lot of evolutionists on other forums, and one of the big topics is always dinosaurs. I think it's possible that Dinos were around a lot more recently then some may believe...

I don't like to get too dogmatic about this. There is room for different views here, some believe all dinosaurs were destroyed during the flood, (there is much fossil evidence for flood related dino-deaths), others believe eggs or young were carried on the ark and survived the flood, only to later become extinct at the hands of men?who called them "dragons." The Bible uses ancient names like "Behemoth? and ?tannin.? (Job 40:15-19) The word dinosaur was not heard until the 1800's.

If they survived the flood, dinosaurs would have come under increasing pressure from hunters and weather changes?many believe Earth's atmosphere after the flood was changed quite a bit. They would have been killed out of fear and for food, just like many other large animals down through history. Men have driven many species to extinction, not just the dinosaurs. As I posted above, scientists have now found T-Rex bones with blood and soft tissue still present?providing strong evidence to suggest they may have existed on the Earth far more recently than evolutionists care to admit.

Take a look at both of the informative articles below. One thing is certain, there are references to dragons and behemoths with scales in the Bible and throughout European writings and artwork, Marco Polo wrote of Chinese training dragons, and evidence exists today suggesting they may have been seen by Anasazi Indians in North America at the first link below:
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2705
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/15

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members
I say it' date=' because the people involved in the project say it. Every test so far done confirms it, but they are not ready to sign on 100%. I will! My job isn't on the line lol.[/color']


Well the study I cite comes from almost 10 years later, so what other tests are they still doing? Or is that just your guess? I don't doubt that they will exclaim all sorts of things in the lab when looking under microscopes, and of course these tentative claims sound more sexy to the press, but it's the testing that confirms what's really there. 10 years later, and no red blood cells. What they've found is the remnants of red-blood cells: parts of haemoglobin molecules and "...microstructures (with) cell-like morphology." Actual cells with cell walls, organelles and nuclei etc are not hard to confirm, be they blood cells or any other type of cell. As soon as we start to second-guess what we think they are willing to confirm and not-willing to confirm, and begin favouring initial exclamations made in the lab over published research, it just becomes conjecture.

Still, we do at least agree that remnants of blood cells have been confirmed, and that there is demonstrably bone there. All I wanted to do by looking at the evidence was confirm the extent of the preservation. If someone said to me 'soft tissue', I would think they were literally talking about a lump of flesh, so I just wanted to confirm what the researchers actually meant. Even bone fibre is an amazing find. I've made my comments on how those finds apply to an old-earth model, so feel free to respond. What I'm particularly interested in is where these kind of claims come from:

"To claim that bone could remain intact for millions of years without being fossilized (mineralized) stretches credibility." - Carl Wieland

If there's lots of research that claims that there's no way bone fragments and heme could last this long no matter what the conditions, then I readily accept that this evidence does not fit with an old-earth model. But if these kind of comments just come from incredulity based on assumptions, then they don't mean much to me.

Here's what Mary Schweitzer concludes in 2007: "These results suggest that present models of fossilization processes may be incomplete and that soft tissue elements may be more commonly preserved, even in older specimens, than previously thought."

I don't know much about mineralisation, and the research done on it so far, do you? Are we in a position to say that fossils not being completely mineralised after millions of years is incredible or impossible?
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Well, we are in a position to assume scientists are not always right.
We are certainly in a position to say that creatures like Coelacanth were mistakenly thought by the evolutionists to be extinct millions of years ago. I'm sure before the "fresh one showed up," that the idea of a living one would have been considered an outrageous view by the monkey men?perhaps even more outrageous than gooey dino remains.....?

Look, all anyone is saying here is?it is possible that dinos were around more recently than some in the scientific community may want to believe. Creationists have lost their jobs over stuff like this, in effect being shut down by the Godless community for even suggesting or exploring publicly what I just wrote above. For me, the most interesting comment in the article is not the dinosaur blood and tissue, it is this little tidbit:

"Schweitzer confronted her boss, famous paleontologist ?Dinosaur? Jack Horner, with her doubts about how these could really be blood cells. Horner suggested she try to prove they were not red blood cells, and she says, ?So far, we haven?t been able to."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... canth.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

"Well, we are in a position to assume scientists are not always right."

Agreed, so it's possible that the scientific claim 'all bones would be 100% mineralised after x million years' is not right. This is what Schweitzer suggests in her research.

"If they survived the flood, dinosaurs would have come under increasing pressure from hunters and weather changes?many believe Earth's atmosphere after the flood was changed quite a bit. They would have been killed out of fear and for food, just like many other large animals down through history. Men have driven many species to extinction, not just the dinosaurs. As I posted above, scientists have now found T-Rex bones with blood and soft tissue still present?providing strong evidence to suggest they may have existed on the Earth far more recently than evolutionists care to admit."

It certainly fits better with a young-earth scenario *if* most research points towards bone and other organic molecules not lasting for millions of years. But as to whether dinosaurs were around even after the Biblical flood, I'm not sure many Creationists would say this find directly supports that assertion. These are still fossilized bones we're talking about. They are almost completely mineralised and have been found buried in rocks. So in the Creation model this would represent an animal that died in the flood and has been found in flood deposits, would it not?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

I'm not a mineral expert, I do have some fossils, and I have examined a lot of them over the years.
Regarding the mineralization process, check this out:

"A recent book, co-authored by a world expert on dinosaurs, points out some things about dinosaur bones that are of great interest to creationists.

For one thing, it says:
?Bones do not have to be ?turned into stone? to be fossils, and usually most of the original bone is still present in a dinosaur fossil.?

Ok, but even if the actual bone is not replaced by rock minerals, some fossil dinosaur bones are rock-hard, and show under the microscope when cut that they have been thoroughly ?permineralized.? This means that rock minerals have been deposited into all the spaces within the original bone. Doesn?t this show that the formation of these fossils, at least, must represent a long time? Think again. The same authoritative work also tells us:

?The amount of time that it takes for a bone to become completely permineralized is highly variable. If the groundwater is heavily laden with minerals in solution, the process can happen rapidly. Modern bones that fall into mineral springs can become permineralized within a matter of weeks.?
So even a rock-solid, hard shiny fossil dinosaur bone, showing under the microscope that all available spaces have been totally filled with rock minerals, does not indicate that it necessarily took millions of years to form at all.

Now of course if a dinosaur bone is indeed permineralized, it would give it great protection from the normal processes which cause things such as bone to just naturally ?fall apart.? So a permineralized bone might indeed be anything from a few weeks to millions of years old.

However, in a situation where the dinosaur bone has been prevented from being invaded by mineral-rich water, one would expect that over millions of years, even locked away from all bacterial agents, dinosaur bone would, in obeying the laws of thermodynamics, just disintegrate from the random motions of the molecules therein.

There are actually instances, mentioned in the same book, in which dinosaur bones in Alberta, Canada, were encased in ironstone nodules shortly after being buried. We are told:
?The nodules prevented water from invading the bones, which for all intents and purposes cannot be distinguished from modern bone.?

This is a stunning revelation. Evolutionists are convinced that all dinosaur bones must be at least 65 million years old. Those who take Genesis as real history would predict that no dinosaur bone is more than a few thousand years old, so the existence of such totally unmineralized dinosaur bones that have not disintegrated is perfectly consistent with our expectations.

We have previously told you about the unfossilized dinosaur bone which still contained red blood cells and hemoglobin. Also, we wrote about ?fresh dinosaur bones? in Alaska. Let the evolutionist experts writing this book confirm this:

?An even more spectacular example was found on the North Shore of Alaska, where many thousands of bones lack any significant degree of permineralization. The bones look and feel like old cow bones, and the discoverers of the site did not report it for twenty years because they assumed they were bison, not dinosaur, bones.?

In summary, therefore:
Most fossil dinosaur bones still contain the original bone.

Even when heavily permineralized (?fossilized?), this does not need to require more than a few weeks. The Creation/Flood scenario for fossilization would allow many centuries for such permineralization to occur, even under less than ideal conditions.

Where bones have not been protected by permineralization, they are sometimes found in a condition which to all intents and purpose looks as if they are at most centuries, not millions of years old..."
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creatio ... nes.asp#r6

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



×
×
  • Create New...