Well, we were looking
at dinosaur fossils of the bones that have been fossilized
from dinosaurs and these honestly look more
like rocks to me, but there what do you have here? What do you say - Well this actually
is not a bone. These are fragments
of a triceratops horn. Okay. In 2012, the Creation Research
Society sponsored Mark Armitage and I to go to the Hell
Creek Formation in Montana, which is a very popular place
for finding dinosaur bones, and we instead dug out
a triceratops brow horn. Now it's just
in crumbled pieces now, so we can't really, you know, put it together
and show you a horn, and what we've done of course
is have to work with it where you actually
destroy portions of it, but you have to recognize that inside that rock
looking structure are tissue, cells and protein, still there. All right, so let's go
back for a second, because if this horn, or part of a dinosaur, had been buried for millions
and millions of years, you would not expect to still
be able to see tissue, but are you saying that's
what we're finding? That is absolutely
what we're finding. In fact, in a nature
communication paper in 2015, they referred to it as common. So is this -
is this unusual for those who have followed the
traditional paradigm associated with when dinosaurs lived
and when they died? It would certainly be
not at the least expected. In fact Mary Schweitzer, who was the first one to really
make this popularized, and was the first one
to really get discoveries that were noticed by
a wide range of scientists, she comments in interviews that she had her technicians
repeat the study over, and over, and over again, simply because it's
so difficult to understand how you could have this material
still in a dinosaur fossil that is supposed to be 65, 70, 75, 80 million years of age, because any competent biochemist
knows that tissue, cells, proteins break down. They don't just -
they're not concrete, they don't just exist
for eons of time, they break down, and in fact they tend to break
down fairly quickly depending upon the conditions, and certainly in Hell Creek, the conditions would
be warm up, cool down, warm up, cool down. We found this horn, for example, just a mere one foot
below the surface. Now it was in
very solid sandstone, so we had to chisel it out, but it was just
below the surface, so there was
no thermal protection by being deep in the ground. So it would have been very
much subjected to fluctuations of hot and cold,
and hot and cold, and any biochemist can tell you that is the fastest way
to destroy material. It's difficult enough
to envision it surviving for four or five thousand years, but 60 million years
70 million years? See, that really becomes
very difficult to make any kind of biochemical basis for
how it could have survived. Okay, well let's talk now about
what you do with these, okay? You've got these here, what would be
your standard process of wanting to then examine? Well, as you can see,
these look like a rock. So what you have to do
is you have to literally dissolve the rock away. So what we do is, we soak the fossil material
in a solution called EDTA. It's a very mild acid that will grab the calcium ions
out of the fossil. And so you just literally
dissolve the fossil, and what you'll have after
you've dissolved the fossils, the tissue will be remaining because the EDTA
won't dissolve the tissue. So where are you now
in this process? What would be your next step? Well, some of these
have just started, but the next step would be, then, we would take and we'd
pour off the solution, Okay. Right now I'm not worried
about what's in here, I will collect that and analyze it
at some point later. But right now I'm just
wanting to look at this. What's left there. Right. So then I'll bring this
over to what we call a dissection microscope. As you can see,
what we see is this is, in essence, dissolved
Triceratops horn magnified. Well, Kevin, what
did you find then? When you were looking at the sample and you
actually found some tissue? Okay. Here's what we found. Here we have a piece of the horn
that has been decalcified, like what I just showed
you over on the bench. Mark Armitage was our
microscopist working on this, and Mark then took a piece of the decalcified horn and put
it in our microscope. See the fibrous material there? That's part of the composition
of the bone matrix itself, but what's really
of interest is, see the white material here on the surface swaying
back and forth? That's actual dinosaur tissue
on the surface. See, this is not a solid fossil. This has got tissue
characteristic to it. See, notice how it flexes back. That's of course
very interesting, how you pull on it, flexes back, pull
on it, flexes back. That's characteristic of tissue. That's what tissue would do. Now, Mark then was able
to extract some very thin layers of elastic material away
from the inner core of the horn, but he didn't have to decalcify
the horn in order to do this. You can see it's
stretchy, it's flexible, in fact look, notice. See how it's stretching, it's stretching almost
to twice its original size of what it was. See this again is
original dinosaur tissue that he's peeled directly
from the fossil. There was no decalcification
that he did first. See, this is how accessible
this tissue was. He didn't have to remove
any fossilized bone to get to this tissue. Okay, now. Here is a light microscope
picture of the tissue itself. You can see the texture of it, and in fact,
see notice the arrows, they're pointing to cells. These cells specifically are
what we call osteocytes. Those are bone cells. They're involved in making bone. Because even though we
think a bone as a rock, bone is tissue. Bone is not a rock. In fact in our bodies, bone is replaced about every
10 years to keep it all fresh in the new matrix
laid down and such, so it -
it's constantly being changed, and that's what those cells do. And if you look at them, then, at a closer magnification, well we see then this is using
scanning electron microscopy, you see the extreme
detail of the cells. See how well that's preserved, I mean that doesn't speak for something that has
been degrading or something that has just been in a non
pristine condition for 65, 70 million years. We would not expect - begin to expect to see such
enormous and elaborate detail. I mean, these structures
are incredibly small. You know, this is
our 20 micron bar here, and see how small
these structures are, still intact. And yet, see,
that kind of detail then, obviously the preservation
process is surprising, really to everybody. But I think, as creationists, we have a lot less to explain
than someone trying to suggest that this is you know, 65,
70 million years of age. Well, let me ask you this first, because I mean,
this is an incredible picture, and I just want to make
sure we're not looking at fossilized material here, or fossilized tissue
that's been replaced by calcium. These are the cells. These are real cells. Correct. Well, Kevin, I understand
you published all of this work. Yes, this work
has been published. We've actually made the cover
of American Laboratory. We also published in a journal
called ACTA Histochemica, and that's a more
technical article. It goes through
and explains, then, what we did, how we processed the horn, and then of course draws
some conclusions from that, particularly the conclusions
are that, even though it's a horn, which is different
from a bone, it still had tissue, even though it was wet when we pulled it
out of the ground, it had what we call matrix, which is another word for mud,
it still had tissue, so just a different specimen than what had
been analyzed before, no one had done a horn before. Now, we start getting closer, and what you're going
to see then is, you're gonna see little pieces
of tissue there, and that's what you're gonna pick off, and then put under the higher
powered microscope, okay, and then under the
higher power microscope, see, now we look
at the tissue itself, and there's the cells. Okay, and there's another, that - and like I say, those are
very specific osteocytes. Now those osteocytes have
a very unique structure. Okay, now we're coming into some of the texture
of the horn itself, and see, this would be a blood vessel, and if you look, see,
this is dissolved away. This would be the interior
of the horn, and you can see all the detail
that'd be left in there after you take the calcium away. And then there,
of course, is an osteocyte. So that has to have shaken
up the scientific community. What's been the response
of all of this? The initial response, when Dr. Schweitzer
first published her work, which is what became
very popularized in 2005. It generated a lot of response the previous papers
had not generated. And there's kind of a question of exactly why it
generated so much response, but in 2005, it was - her paper was published
in the journal Science, which is a very broad
distributed journal, very highly respected journal, color pictures, you know, you can't minimize the impact
of color pictures. So, you had people that would be more biochemistry
and biology backgrounds that, maybe for the first time,
paid attention to this. So that generated I think some -
not only publicity for it, but certainly some controversy. And so, initially, some
of the reaction was rejection. Oh, it's contamination,
you know, those are - that's not really dinosaur,
it's microscopic artifact, it's bacteria, because bacteria can look
kind of strange sometimes, so you had a lot of proposals
of what it could be, and to her credit,
Dr. Schweitzer did more work, which is what science is. She did more analytical
work, dug deeper. They began to find protein. You break open some
of these cells, you look in the - at the matrix
these cells are attached to, and they're protein. Particularly, one of the common
proteins they've found is called collagen. Now, collagen is
the most common protein in any vertebrate, vertebrate meaning those animals
that have spinal columns. Collagen is the most
dominant protein. It's a hearty protein, but there was no reason based on any kind of biochemistry
known about collagen, any kind of biochemistry
of how collagen degrades, there was no reason to think
that collagen could naturally, easily, survive for 65,
70 million years. And all of that research, did
it lead towards the conclusion that it's not bacteria,
it's not something that - It very much did. Right. That - you can dismiss
the bacteria idea, you can dismiss
the contamination idea, it is real dinosaur tissue,
real dinosaur cells, and real dinosaur protein. Okay, so once that
is understood - Yes. - then what happens? Now this is shaking
it up, I guess. That becomes part
of the controversy, because clearly, you're now
faced with how could you explain the survival of this. The pristine survival of this,
not only for so long, but in very
un-pristine conditions. There's nothing pristine
about Hell Creek, Montana, for example. It's not permafrost, it's not like these were
in a deep freeze for millions of years. Like we mentioned before,
the temperature fluctuations, water, you know, water will degrade proteins when we pulled the horn
out of the ground, it had water underneath it, just from the seepage
of rain water. That's why, when we
first dug the horn out, we thought there's
nothing gonna be in there. And there was. So these are not dry, they're not sealed
in some kind of, you know, stainless steel vault. They're subjected to
all kinds of conditions that would degrade this stuff. And so then,
the controversy has been, how do you explain it? And if you read some
of the literature, there's almost, like, desperation of, would you
guys please explain this, because they recognized
what the implications of this could be. Now, some people would claim,
well it means nothing, because we know
how old they are, and therefore it just means that it survived
somehow, big deal. But how do you know
how old they are? Well, you use methods,
supposed methods of dating. Well, this is
a method of dating. The tissue itself can't be
discounted as part of a method of dating. So why do you say
that doesn't count, but this does count? Well it's all the paradigm
drives your conclusions. The paradigm is,
it has to be old, therefore, methods
that give us an old fossil are what we choose. Something that doesn't give
us an old fossil, like tissue, we have to reject
or explain away. And the big push at the moment
is to explain it away, to come up with some explanation
of how the tissue survived. There are several
ideas out there. The most popular one
at the moment is the one that Mary Schweitzer
herself has proposed, where she proposed
that in red blood cells, you have hemoglobin, which of course
is composed of iron, which is what then attracts
and binds the oxygen, so that the hemoglobin
in the red blood cell can transfer the oxygen
around in the body. Okay, what she's proposed is that upon the death
of the animal, the red blood cells ruptured, and they
released the hemoglobin, which released the iron. In biological systems, iron can catalyze
what's called a fenton reaction. And this reaction, in essence,
just causes proteins, for example, to crosslink. So it causes
reactions of protein so that they actually
become more resistant, so in this cross-linked state, microbes don't degrade
them as fast, enzymes don't degrade
them as fast, they just simply
don't compose as fast. And so she's proposed that that, then, explains how they
could lasted millions of years. We reject what she's at
least proposed so far, because we would say first off, thin reactions are also
going to leave signatures. They're gonna leave signatures, and how they're gonna change
the chemical state of certain amino acids and in the protein analysis
that has been done of, like, the collagen, for example, those amino acids
in that protein don't have that altered chemical state that you would expect
from a fenton reaction. See, so we're not seeing the footprints that we
would expect to see if these reactions were actually
causing these massive changes to the proteins that were causing them
to be preserved better. We would also say that the models themselves
that have been studied take some of this into account. You know, the collagen models, they take into account some
of the physical changes that are going
to occur to collagen that you would say may make it
more resistant to degradation. And yet the studies show that it still doesn't last
tens of millions of years. So, there is no physical, chemical evidence
that's going to support the idea that proteins, any protein is going to be able to last
tens of millions of years. It is just strictly
an extrapolation. It must last because we
know these are old, and there becomes
your conundrum. Again, the paradigm
driving the conclusion. We also would challenge that the study
that Dr. Schweitzer did, she used ostrich blood vessels, and she soaked them in water, soaked them in solutions
of iron from hemoglobin, soaked them in
various solutions, and then monitored
their degradation, how fast they degrade, and she reported
that after two years, those that were exposed to her - to the iron were
for the most part un-degraded. But, first, two years at a steady temperature doesn't
extrapolate to 65 million years at an unstated temperature. Second, any technician
can tell you that we take great pains in
laboratories to preserve cells, to preserve protein,
to preserve tissue. We freeze it, we deep freeze it,
we freeze it, you know, minus 200 degrees
in liquid nitrogen. You don't leave it out,
you don't expose it to water, you don't expose it
to all the things that in all honestly
these fossils tended to be exposed to, because everybody knows
that accelerates degradation. So in the normal sense, even someone who holds
to a very recent creation, that would lead you to believe that this shouldn't be
here either, right? Because, even for several
thousands of years, you wouldn't expect it. It certainly would not be
your first prediction. Even from a
creationist position, we know full well that these fossils are exposed
to ground level radiation. In fact, you can take almost any dinosaur fossil and put
a Geiger counter against it, and it'll light it up, because they've
absorbed radiation. So over four thousand years,
we say wow, that's still quite a challenge. I think they'd absorb
radiation and still - so how are you going to explain
65 million years of exposure to this radiation? And Dr. Schweitzer's iron preservation model
doesn't account for that. So as a microbiologist, when you look at this,
the two major paradigms that we have before us, and even though
this is surprising, there is a paradigm
between these two, that better fits the evidence
than the other. I think we understand enough
about the process, and enough about tissue itself
to recognize that the more clear, parsimonious, if you will, the simplest
explanation is just simply that the fossils aren't as old
as they're being claimed to be and so that, clearly, this is in violation
of the dating process. It challenges the
entire dating process. If the fossils of dinosaurs
have been dated incorrectly, which I would say this is
clear evidence they have, then it's very likely the fossils of any organism
has been dated incorrectly, and therefore then, the geologic ages
themselves are incorrect. And we have to go
back and recognize that they use evolution
as their control, if you will. It's the filter. If I don't get a date that fits
what evolution expects, then the date is rejected. It doesn't make a difference
what the date is, it doesn't make a difference how
you came about getting the date. If it doesn't fit
the filter of evolution, if it doesn't fit what we need, if you have something
that is out of the Jurassic, but it's dated
at 300 million years, that can't be right. Therefore, it's
automatically tossed out. Why can't it be right? Because we have, in evolutionary assumptions,
determined that organisms live during the period
of the Jurassic are this old. And so, it sets then the
interpretation for everything. When you have problems
like the soft tissue, say, you either have to reject
the entire dating process, or you have to reject
the soft tissue. You know, you really
can't have both. They're trying to have both, but it clearly is
one or the other. You know, either the fossils
aren't as old as we think they are, or there's some mysterious, unknown, magical process
that preserves them. Well, which is more scientific? What we know today,
the tissue can't last that long, therefore the fossils
can't be that old, regardless of what other dating
methods you claim you've used.
You should see SFT's interview with Mark on refuting critics. It happened maybe a week ago.
This is just a big a problem for old earthers as light time travel is for young earthers; but in reality it's a much bigger one because the evolutionists don't want to invoke the possibility of supernatural events. Simply put, organic material doesn't last long enough for evolution to be true.
Wanted to put together a place for various sources for more reading here. Armitage's own channel (where this video is from) has multiple videos on this same topic. I think he has 4 at least on iron specifically
"Toast" Method: https://www.icr.org/article/soft-tissue-fossils-preserved-by-toasting
Iron: https://creation.com/dinosaur-soft-tissue
https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/bones/iron-key-to-preserving-dinosaur-soft-tissue/
https://www.icr.org/article/dinosaur-soft-tissue-preserved-by-blood
Carbon/General: https://creation.com/dinosaur-blood-fuz-rana
https://creation.com/radiocarbon-jurassic-world-havoc
https://creation.com/c14-dinos
https://answersingenesis.org/geology/carbon-14/carbon-14-in-fossils-and-diamonds/
http://creationwiki.org/Dinosaur_soft_tissue#The_Rate
On calcium phosphate and pyritization and carbonaceous compression: Had to look into this as these aren't often brought up. The short answer is that those papers discuss mineral replacement as "preservation." In other words, over time, the shapes of soft tissues is preserved but the original biological molecules have been replaced with hard mineral precipitates. This is morphological preservation or preservation of shapes and associations ONLY in tissues that later turn to stone. So they are stone. The dino cells are soft...just see armitage's dstri.org
What we're dealing with are soft tissues from inside dinosaur bones that are liberated after we dissolve the bone minerals away with EDTA a weak acid. The blood vessels, cells, veins, nerves, valves, etc. those like Armitage at DSTRI.org are finding are NOT REPLACED. They are ORIGINAL soft tissue elements as Dr. Schweitzer and her team have pounded into the reluctant minds of deep time devotees
So, yeah, everybody is still searching for a "preservation of original biomaterials" theory and iron is insufficient. It only crosslinks every 3rd or 4th amino acid in these long elastin and collagen proteins...so that means 66-75% of the elastin has not been crosslnked and stabilized, so why have they not decayed away over 68MY????
Maybe the answer is the most obvious one…soft tissue doesn't last millions of years. And the evolutionists god-of-the-gaps called "more time" isn't going to help you; it'll simply make you look foolish
EDIT: even more on iron:
Prof Matthew Collins, a world authority on biogeochemistry and biomolecular archaeology at University of York (UK), is very sceptical that iron from haemoglobin could have done the magic required: “I have yet to hear a plausible explanation for how soft tissues can be preserved for this long … for me they’re defying basic chemistry and physics. … Iron may slow down the decay process but it’s not clear how it could be arrested altogether.” He was also quoted in the leading journal Science: “Proteins decay in an orderly fashion. We can slow it down, but not by a lot.” These dinosaur soft tissues and biomolecules, while extremely challenging to the evolutionary paradigm, perfectly fit a historical global Flood, thousands of years ago.