Real Science Friday: Now Soft Tissue from a Mosasaur!

[Jefferson]

RSF: Now Soft Tissue from a Mosasaur!

This is the show from Friday May 6th, 2011.

SUMMARY:



* Iron-clad Dinosaur-era Soft-tissue: Co-hosts Fred Williams and Bob Enyart talk about last week's stunning peer-reviewed report of yet another soft-tissue discovery (after such finds from a T. rex, a hadrosaur, and archeopteryx)! This time scientists from secular universities in Europe and America use sophisticated techniques to rule out modern contamination, and conclude that original biological material exists from a relatively small bone from an allegedly 70-million year old extinct marine reptile called a Mosasaur. The electron microscope was invented in 1931 and even from 1903 the ultramicroscope could study objects smaller than the wavelength of light. Thus more than a century of lost opportunity has passed with perhaps millions of fossils improperly handled because evolutionary bias has been so stifling that countless scientists likely never even considered looking for original biological material.



* Mosasaur Meets Real Science Friday: Bob asked long-time friend of BEL, Dave Willis from Indiana, to join the conversation about this latest news, reported also in Science Digest, May 2, 2011, for Dave has interacted at length with various scientists involved in the extraordinary discovery of proteins from what they call the Mesozoic Era. (As established by many proofs, see RSF's List of Not So Old Things, the Mesozoic Era was not an era but a rapidly deposited sedimentary layer.)



* Complete Collagen Decay Expected in Thousands of Years: Dave Willis and Fred Williams talk about the calculated maximum survival time of collagen, not in millions but in thousands of years, from a 2008 report in Science Magazine as it relates to the discoveries of soft dinosaur tissue.

* And Now, Amino Acids Line Up to show a Young Earth: Amino acids are not symmetrical and exist in equal proportions on earth in their right- and left-handed forms. However, living cells use only left-handed amino acids, and after death, an inexorable process of decay begins to randomize the handedness. Thus, with the peer-reviewed report from the Royal Society of London a decade ago mentioning the unfinished racemization of amino acids in dinosaur eggs, creationists have been eager to show that, as an additional confirmation that dinosaurs did not live millions but only thousands of years ago, that the amino acids in soft-tissue fossils will not have become randomized! And

Today’s Resource: You'll just love the science DVDs, books, and written, audio or video debates we offer through our Real Science Friday broadcasts! So have you browsed through our Science Department in the KGOV Store? Check out Bob most highly-recommended astronomy DVD, What You Aren't Being Told About Astronomy! And see Walt Brown’s great hardcover book, In the Beginning! You’ll also love Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez’ Privileged Planet (clip), and Illustra Media’s Unlocking the Mystery of Life (clip)! You can consider our BEL Science Pack; Bob Enyart’s Age of the Earth Debate; Bob's debate about Junk DNA with the infamous anti-creationist Dr. Eugenie Scott. And if you have young kids or grand kids, you owe it to them and to yourself to give them as a gift the SUPERB kids' radio programming on audio CD, Jonathan Park: The Adventure Begins! And Bob strongly recommends that you subscribe to CMI’s tremendous Creation magazine and if you're up to reading more technical scientific articles, you'll also want to subscribe to CRSQ! And to order any of our BEL science products by phone, just call us at 1-800-8Enyart (836-9278).

* Special Editions of Real Science Friday:
- BEL's famous List of Not-So-Old Things
- Bob's debate with Christian Darwinist British author James Hannam
- PZ Myers blogs against Real Science Friday so we hit back with the PZ Trochlea Challenge
- Waiting for Darwin's Other Shoe: Science mag cover: Darwin Was Wrong on the Tree of Life
- Microbiologist in Studio: Creation Research Society Quarterly editor on new genetic findings
- Caterpillar Kills Atheism: describe how a bug could evolve to liquefy itself and then build itself into a flying creature
- And see the RSF Offer of $2,000 to get 16 letters of the alphabet in their correct places; $500 paid in 1998; $1,500 in 2010...

 

[Sherman]

65 million year old soft tissue? I don't think so. I think it was buried for something like 4000 years.

Interesting show. Thanks!

 

[Stripe]

 

[Alate_One]

Mind you, this "soft" tissue isn't soft, nor was it soft tissue originally. It's bone protein and it was bound to solid rock. The material had to be liberated from rock by de-mineralization.

Low concentrations of the structural protein collagen have recently been reported in dinosaur fossils based primarily on mass spectrometric analyses of whole bone extracts. However, direct spectroscopic characterization of isolated fibrous bone tissues, a crucial test of hypotheses of biomolecular preservation over deep time, has not been performed. Here, we demonstrate that endogenous proteinaceous molecules are retained in a humerus from a Late Cretaceous mosasaur (an extinct giant marine lizard). In situ immunofluorescence of demineralized bone extracts shows reactivity to antibodies raised against type I collagen, and amino acid analyses of soluble proteins extracted from the bone exhibit a composition indicative of structural proteins or their breakdown products. These data are corroborated by synchrotron radiation-based infrared microspectroscopic studies demonstrating that amino acid containing matter is located in bone matrix fibrils that express imprints of the characteristic 67 nm D-periodicity typical of collagen. Moreover, the fibrils differ significantly in spectral signature from those of potential modern bacterial contaminants, such as biofilms and collagen-like proteins. Thus, the preservation of primary soft tissues and biomolecules is not limited to large-sized bones buried in fluvial sandstone environments, but also occurs in relatively small-sized skeletal elements deposited in marine sediments.

Organic material that is KNOWN to be 4000 years old is in significantly better preserved and not fossilized. Egyptian ships of that age still retain entire boards and inscriptions on the boards can still be read. Piles of rope are still on the floor of various caves.

Saying "organic material was found, therefore fossils are only 4000 years old" is ridiculous. Even if you think it's less than 70 million, there's no reason to think it is 4000 years old . . .

 

[Stripe]

Get back to us when you've listened to the show. :thumb:

 

[The Barbarian]

It looks a lot more degraded than the 34,000 y/o flax fabric found recently...

http://alotofgaul.blogspot.com/2009/09/new-oldest-fabric-ever-found.html

But Grabbing at straws, they are. MIllion-year old organic molecules are not unknown. Leaves that old in rock are sometimes still green when the rock is split to reveal them.

 

[Stripe]

:rotfl:

 

[Bob Enyart]

Even if you think it's less than 70 million, there's no reason to think it is 4000 years old . . .

Other than eye-witness evidence that is...
...in God's Word.

 

[Bob Enyart]

Mind you, this "soft" tissue isn't soft...

A_O, can you forgive us for using that terminology when the abstract of the paper that you yourself quoted used the same description?

... Thus, the preservation of primary soft tissues and biomolecules is not limited to large-sized bones buried in fluvial sandstone environments [BE: as with the T. rex], but also occurs in relatively small-sized skeletal elements deposited in marine sediments.​

Also, please consider that there are various types of original biological tissue that have been identified so far from fossils that are allegedly between 65 and 150 million years old.

 

[The Barbarian]

I'd be open to any evidence that soft tissues can't be preserved in anoxic deposits for millions of years.

And, of course, some evidence that this is "tissue" rather than some biological molecules.

 

[Bob Enyart]

I'd be open to any evidence that... this is "tissue" rather than some biological molecules.

Hello Barbarian! You can poke around in the links at KGOV.com/list in our List of Not So Old Things to begin to find out about all the different kinds of tissue that's being found, including cartilage, blood vessels, etc. And of course that same abstract that A_O quoted describes what is being found as tissue. And all that we've been talking about with dinosaurs and the mosasaur is just a fraction of what you can consider. Our LIST also includes:

* Fossils with DNA and Bacteria such as:
- allegedly 17 million year old magnolia leaf DNA (Scientific American 1993)
- allegedly 120 million year old insect fossil DNA (Nature 1993)
- allegedly 200 million year old fish fossil DNA (Science News 1992)
- allegedly 30 million year old bee fossil containing LIVING bacteria (Science 1995)
- allegedly 600 million year old rock contains LIVING bacillus (Nature 2000).

Can you make a short list of observations that would falsify these long-age estimates? Can anything theoretically falsify those assumptions for you?

-Bob Enyart

 

[Nick M]

I am wise . .

Uh huh.

 

[The Barbarian]

Barbarian suggests:
I'd be open to any evidence that... this is "tissue" rather than some biological molecules.

Hello Barbarian! You can poke around in the links at KGOV.com/list in our List of Not So Old Things to begin to find out about all the different kinds of tissue that's being found, including cartilage, blood vessels, etc. And of course that same abstract that A_O quoted describes what is being found as tissue. And all that we've been talking about with dinosaurs and the mosasaur is just a fraction of what you can consider. Our LIST also includes:

* Fossils with DNA and Bacteria such as:
- allegedly 17 million year old magnolia leaf DNA (Scientific American 1993)
- allegedly 120 million year old insect fossil DNA (Nature 1993)
- allegedly 200 million year old fish fossil DNA (Science News 1992)
- allegedly 30 million year old bee fossil containing LIVING bacteria (Science 1995)
- allegedly 600 million year old rock contains LIVING bacillus (Nature 2000).

Hello, Bob. Nice to talk to you again. Yes, it's not news that tissues can be preserved for millions of years in the right circumstances. I alluded to that before. But I was interested in evidence that this bit of organic material is still organized into tissue.

Can you make a short list of observations that would falsify these long-age estimates?

Hmm... If the speed of light were a lot faster than it has been tested to be, that would do it. With that, there'd have to be some explanation as to why all living things hadn't been fried by such intense radiation.

Or if there was something wrong with the way physicists test the rate of radioactive decay.

Can anything theoretically falsify those assumptions for you?

Technically, they are inferences from evidence. And they've been verified by testing with a known historical event.

 

[Alate_One]

A_O, can you forgive us for using that terminology when the abstract of the paper that you yourself quoted used the same description?

I'm going based on what you did with the "still liquid" ink. When you say something like "soft tissue" you often are trying to imply something very different than scientists writing about the subject.

Also, please consider that there are various types of original biological tissue that have been identified so far from fossils that are allegedly between 65 and 150 million years old.

I've done some looking and yes there have been records of biomaterials (not tissue) being preserved within fossils for years (I noticed papers from the 80s). But again, that doesn't mean they must be 4000 years old.

 

[Alate_One]

Other than eye-witness evidence that is...
...in God's Word.

That's only if you assume certain things about Genesis which are not necessarily what is actually intended or implied by the text.

But if you're going to say you believe in a 6000 year old earth because of scripture, why not simply leave it at that? Why bother with evidence at all when you've already asserted you're just going to interpret it based on what you already believe?

 

[Alate_One]

* Complete Collagen Decay Expected in Thousands of Years: Dave Willis and Fred Williams talk about the calculated maximum survival time of collagen, not in millions but in thousands of years, from a 2008 report in Science Magazine as it relates to the discoveries of soft dinosaur tissue.

FYI That's not a standard peer reviewed report. It's a technical comment, and not subject to peer review and there's a rebuttal to it published in the same issue.

 

[Stripe]

I'm going based on what you did with the "still liquid" ink. When you say something like "soft tissue" you often are trying to imply something very different than scientists writing about the subject.

:darwinsm:

 

[Stripe]

FYI That's not a standard peer reviewed report. It's a technical comment, and not subject to peer review and there's a rebuttal to it published in the same issue.

Wow - you're dedicated to every single little technicality being properly scrutinised aren't you. :chuckle:

 

[DavisBJ]

In this program it is interesting to listen carefully to the discussion about the carbon-14 dating that was done. In summary, Bob and Fred Williams (and their phone-in guest, Dave Willis) accuse the researchers of ignoring the clear implications of the detected Carbon-14.

They are talking about C-14 dating of some bone material from a mosasaur fossil. The mosasaur is said to have lived 70 million years ago. From my looking on Google images, a mosasaur appears to be an ancient merger of a shark’s body with an alligator snout. This is a different study from the T-Rex they spoke of earlier in the program.

Here is the dialogue, starting at 10:11

Bob Enyart:

We talked to Jack Horner and we offered him a lot of money – I think eventually we upped it to $23,000, a grant, in writing – if he would carbon-14 date that T-Rex with Mary Schweitzer. So finally he said, “All right, I’ll ask Mary if she want to do that. ” Well then it turns out they did not want to do it.

But with this mosasaur, Dave, eventually they went ahead and they carbon-14 dated this mosasaur.​

Dave Willis:

The argument that was being made about the T-Rex was, “We can’t do a carbon-14 date on this because the demineralizing fluid we use has carbon in it, and it’s modern carbon. And so we will contaminate it and ruin the C-14 date.” Well that sounded reasonable to me. And I thought - Well, then just cut the sample in half and demineralize one part and don’t demineralize the other part, and you can get a carbon-14 date on it that way, and not contaminate it.”​

Bob Enyart:

Right, exactly. And so this does show - Jack Horner is a world renowned paleontologist. He was on the set of all 3 Jurassic Park movies as their consultant, their science consultant. And so Fred, I’m a pastor of a Bible church, and here I am telling him, “Of course you can carbon-14 that T-Rex. Just try it. And he says, “Oh no, we can’t do it, because, you know, you can’t do it.” And so now it turns out a few years later you sure could do it. And they have done it. And the results are difficult for them to bear, Dave Willis, because they have conflicting desires when they study this thing. Their gut, in their bones they know that the biological material is original. They know it’s original.​

Dave Willis:

And it’s not contaminated.​

Bob Enyart:

It’s not contaminated.​

Dave Willis:

They want to make the point that the proteins they found weren’t contaminated with bacteria. But …​

Bob Enyart:

But when they carbon-14 date it there should be none. It should be infinity. All of the carbon-14 should be gone.​

Fred Williams:

…should have long turned into nitrogen. But they found carbon-14, and what date did they give? What was the …​

Bob Enyart:

They gave a very very very …​

Dave Willis:

24,600 years, with just a very small margin of error. And I might point this out, that’s not a little bit, that’s a lot of carbon-14.​

Bob Enyart:

That’s a lot of carbon-14 as compared to modern carbon. And they would expect – carbon-14 has a very short half-life of what, 5700 years or so. And so if you have carbon-14 in a living animal that’s absorbed it from the atmosphere, once it dies it no longer absorbs carbon-14. Especially when it’s buried. And so then the carbon-14 decays. The normal carbon does not. And so the scientists study the ratio. And then, carbon-14 only lasts thousands of years, as in tens of thousands of years at the most. It doesn’t last hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Most public school students completely misunderstand carbon-14, which is a relatively simple concept.​

Dave Willis:

And that’s why they did the carbon-14 test. They weren’t trying to find out if it was a young mosasaur. They were trying to find out if any of the protein they found, the collagen or collagen-like substance was from bacteria. And if it was then it would show …​

Bob Enyart:

carbon-14, it would be recent.​

Dave Willis:

Right. And if it wasn’t they could say, “Look, here we did a carbon-14 date and we got no carbon-14. So we’ve ruled it out as being bacteria.” Well along the way to that desired result they stumbled onto finding a whole lot of carbon-14.​

Bob Enyart:

So with their evolutionary blinders they thought they’d have no carbon-14 because it’s 70 million years old. Lo and behold, with our creationist glasses on we can see clearly that this dinosaur didn’t live 70 million years ago. So of course you’re going to find carbon-14 just like you find it in everything else that has carbon that’s not supposed to have carbon-14.​

Fred Williams:

Well you know the irony I love in this article, and this is just a week old, Bob. This article was published April 29, 2011. And I love it that they say, “This carbon-14 is most likely due to bacterial activity near the outer surface.”​

Dave Willis:

They ground away the outer surface.​

Fred Williams:

They even admit, they say, “Although no bacterial proteins were found …”​

Dave Willis:

And no DNA of any bacteria was found, or at least they, I think they said they found a tiny bit of it.​

Bob Enyart:

Virtually none, and not enough to account for this 4% of carbon-14 compared to normal carbon.​

Dave Willis:

That’s very powerful right there, Bob, because if they are going to try to say that the amount of carbon-14 that they found came from bacteria, where’s the DNA of that bacteria?

One point, maybe you’ve made this point before to your listeners today is this doesn’t necessarily mean that any of us think that the mosasaur is 24,600 years old. There are reasons why it might still only be 10,000 or maybe 6,000 years old.​

Bob Enyart:

Right. When the old-earth atheists and evolutionists, when they date things by radiometric dating, and they say, “Look, this date proves that this diamond is 1.2 billion years old”, and then we find carbon-14 in the diamond, which only lasts thousands of years, so what we say to them is, “Your assumptions of how old things will be based on radiometric dating, your assumptions are wrong. And the fact that carbon-14 is still in there proves your assumptions are wrong. These things are recent.” So their assumptions of why they would say it’s 24,000 years old, and this diamond is 1.2 billion, those assumptions are all wrong. And it’s the creationists who are pressing forward to truly understanding the radiometric dates.​

There are multiple issues here, but for now I call attention to the way they try to dance through the C-14 minefield. This is a dance I am seeing Bob and Fred do repeatedly lately. They know that C-14 dating is widely used, including in support of Old Testament archaeology. It would be foolish to dismiss it, but it so often comes up with these dates of tens of thousands of years. Dates of only a few thousand years are fine, but they can’t tolerate any date that would pre-date the creation described in a literal reading of Genesis.

A carbon- 14 half-live curve is like the bottom half of the slope coming off a smoothly rounded hill. It is steepest at the top, but flattens out until it becomes level. The height is represented by the amount of C-14 measured, and the distance along the ground is the date it corresponds to. A YEC C-14 curve starts with the smooth curve going down, but then needs to precipitously drop to ground level at just past the point that you are half-way down the hill (corresponding to about 6000 years) – almost a cliff. Such an adjustment in C-14 decay at a point in time would require a restructuring of the laws of physics at a fundamental level, which would have consequences that cascade into other physical processes.

In the case above, C-14 dating gave a date of 24,600 years – a date acceptable to neither the creationists nor the evolutionists. Fred Williams and Dave Willis pooh-pooh the idea that the C-14 was actually from contamination from modern bacteria. They quote just a couple of extracts from the report, but stop short of including others, such as “microscopic clusters of bone-cyanobacteria were seen in places …”, and “it is possible that the outer surface of the bone has been painted with animal glue at some point.” So we go down the YEC path and ask for a fundamental restructuring of physical law 7000 years ago, or we say that C-14 dating that works fine at 6000 years also works once we are past 8000 years, and there was probably a small (yes, small, Bob and Dave) amount of contamination.

By far the most definitive YEC effort to show radiometric dating favors the YEC view was the “RATE” (Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth) study commissioned by ICR starting in the 1990s. it turned out to be about an 8-year effort by a team of YEC PhDs who examined radiometric dating, and documented what they felt was incorrect about it. The only part of it I have looked into much is the C-14 part of the study, headed up by John Baumgardner. The study is technical enough that an outsider (on C-14 dating, that includes me) is not likely to find many flaws in it. But several years ago a Christian by the name of Kirk Bertsche came along, with some technical background in C-14 dating. He read the chapter in the RATE report dealing with why C-14 proves that diamonds and coal and oil and so on are all much younger than science says. Here again the C-14 dates are way too old for YEC comfort – like 40,000 and 50,000 years.

Kirk authored a fairly in-depth analysis of why Baumgardner’s work on C-14 dating was flawed. One of the earlier places this is found is in a discussion (like this one) on a forum called TheologyWeb, starting in November of 2007. It’s a long thread, and sadly, laced with far too much invective and distracting contention (mostly from OECs). However, both Kirk and John (who joined the thread to answer Kirk) largely remained above the use of derogatory language and stuck to specifics of C-14 dating. Baumgardner did shame himself a bit at first by lacing his initial response to Kirk with multiple charges of “red-herring”, “novice”, and such – which I think he came to rue later. Kirk uniformly avoided any type of ad-homs, and when it was all over, Baumgardner was last seen staggering over a distant ridge and into the sunset. Kirk is over there lounging in that hammock, with the martini.

Bottom line as it applies to this program of Enyart’s, here is nonsense captured for us all (from above): “when they carbon-14 date it there should be none. It should be infinity. All of the carbon-14 should be gone” - and - “Look, here we did a carbon-14 date and we got no carbon-14” – and - “the fact that carbon-14 is still in there proves your assumptions are wrong” - and "everything else that has carbon that’s not supposed to have carbon-14".

Bob and Fred – the Abbott and Costello of science.

 

[One Eyed Jack]

That's only if you assume certain things about Genesis which are not necessarily what is actually intended or implied by the text.

But if you're going to say you believe in a 6000 year old earth because of scripture, why not simply leave it at that? Why bother with evidence at all when you've already asserted you're just going to interpret it based on what you already believe?

Why should we shut off our brains? Are you afraid the word of God can't withstand scrutiny?