Of course the news was greeted with surprise, disbelief and astonishment, because it totally contradicts the assumption held by many scientists that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago. How could soft tissues survive so long? The explanations, devised by various scientists to answer this question, are quite ingenious.
One explanation is that "fairly remarkable conditions must have existed in the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago." Another suggests that 'tough? molecules replace the dinosaur tissues, cell by cell.
Normally, when an animal dies, worms and bugs and bacteria will quickly eat up anything that is soft, then the remaining bone material is weathered away and dissolved. Even a very large cattle beast, if left on a paddock, will totally disappear in only a year or two - only a few large bones will remain. Even if a beast sinks into mud, it will not remain intact for a thousand years, let alone 68 million! Again, if the beast is covered quickly and sealed by sediment, it will become . . .
In the last week of March 2005 the BBC reported that several dinosaur experts had discovered samples of what appeared to be soft tissues from a tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone. The US researchers told Science magazine that the organic components resemble cells and fine blood vessels.
Of course the news was greeted with surprise, disbelief and astonishment, because it totally contradicts the assumption held by many scientists that dinosaurs died out millions of years ago. How could soft tissues survive so long? The explanations, devised by various scientists to answer this question, are quite ingenious.
One explanation is that "fairly remarkable conditions must have existed in the Montana site where the T. rex died, 68 million years ago." Another suggests that 'tough? molecules replace the dinosaur tissues, cell by cell.
Normally, when an animal dies, worms and bugs and bacteria will quickly eat up anything that is soft, then the remaining bone material is weathered away and dissolved. Even a very large cattle beast, if left on a paddock, will totally disappear in only a year or two - only a few large bones will remain. Even if a beast sinks into mud, it will not remain intact for a thousand years, let alone 68 million! Again, if the beast is covered quickly and sealed by sediment, it will become mineralized, and all soft tissues will be lost.
When Dr. Mary Schweitzer, of North Carolina Stat University, dissolved away the minerals in one of the samples, she found transparent, flexible filaments that resemble blood vessels. There were also traces of what look like blood cells, and others that look like osteocytes - cells that build and maintain bone.
She told the BBC's Science in Action program, ". . . its from an extinct animal but it doesn't have a lot of the characteristics of what people would call a fossil . . . it still has places where there are no secondary minerals, and its not any more dense than modern bone; its bone more than anything."
There is one explanation that fits all the facts, but most scientists will not even consider it because it cuts right across their assumptions. The fossil is YOUNG! If the dinosaur died only a short time ago, maybe only a thousand or two years ago, you would expect to find its soft tissues still intact. The normal processes of decay and dissolution have not had time to destroy the tissues, therefore the sample is not as old as it is supposed to be.
The Bible gives a very young age to the Earth, only about 6000 years. Dinosaurs were created on day six, along with cattle and other land animals. At this stage all creatures were vegetarian, and the world was a safe and benign environment. From the time of creation, for the next 1300 years Man lived with dinosaurs, but then a global flood came as a judgement and all land creatures were destroyed. Their remains are still to be found in the sedimentary rocks laid down by the flood.
Noah, however, preserved a sample pair of all land animals in the Ark and released them when the flood receded. These ancestors of all of today's land creatures re-populated the planet, but the climate had changed, and it was not so easy to survive. Creatures which did not adapt to the new conditions died out, along with most dinosaurs. Man hunted these creatures through the centuries, and finally all the very large ones were gone. The T. rex remains found in Montana may have been one of the last of that species to die, perhaps by some natural disaster?
The tissue sample is a challenge to thinking scientists. It exposes the bankruptcy of their assumptions about evolution and the age of the Earth, and points them to the only viable alternative explanation, that the world is young. If the sample is still fresh, it must be young. If it is young, the theory about dinosaurs dieing out millions of years ago must be wrong.
Richard Gunther, Copyright 2006