Scientific evidence can not justify soft tissue in fossils.wmv
Channel: What is
Date: 2012-01-07

The bone itself has long dominated the field of paleontology, a result of the belief that no tissue could be found in an extinct dinosaur bone. By all the rules of paleontology it is believed that soft tissue can survive at most for a few tens of thousands of years, not 65 million years.  

Dr. Mary Schweitzer, an associate professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, created the molecular paleontology field of study. While studying dissolved pieces of a T-Rex bone, she found something that should not have been there: soft tissue [stretchy fibrous matrix, three-dimensional supple bone cells intact and translucent blood vessels].
  
In January 2004 a fragment of medullary bone was soaked in dilute acid to remove some calcium phosphate. This is an unusual procedure  since scientists assume that a fossilized dinosaur consists of rock that would entirely dissolve in acid.

"Everyone knows how soft tissues degrade," Dr. Schweitzer says. "If you take a blood sample and you stick it on a shelf, you have nothing recognizable in about a week. So why would there be anything left in dinosaurs?"
 
Dr. Schweitzer also examined a piece of the dinosaur's cortical bone. "We stuck the bone in the same kind of solution," she says. "The bone mineral dissolved away, and it left these transparent blood vessels. I took one look, and I just said: 'Uh-uh. This isn't happening. This is just not happening.' " She started applying the same treatment to bone fragments from another dinosaur that she had acquired for her dissertation. "Sure enough," she says, "vessels all over the place."
 
Less than a month later Dr. Schweitzer found  what looked like perfectly formed osteocytes, the cells inside bone. 
 
Other discoveries:
Once, when Dr. Schweitzer was working with a T-Rex skeleton harvested from Hell Creek, she noticed that the fossil exuded a distinctly organic odor. "It smelled just like one of the cadavers we had in the lab who had been treated with chemotherapy before he died," she says. It was believed that such fossils were made up entirely of minerals. To most paleontologists, the smell of death did not even register. To Dr. Schweitzer, it meant that traces of life might still cling to those bones. 

In the early 1990s Dr. Schweitzer studied the technical aspects of adhering fossil slices to microscope slides. A collaborator brought a T-Rex slide to a conference and showed it to a pathologist, who examined it under a microscope. "The guy looked at it and said, 'Do you realize you've got red blood cells in that bone?' " Dr. Schweitzer remembers. "My colleague brought it back and showed me, and I just got goose bumps, because everyone knows these things don't last for 65 million years."
 
Dr. Schweitzer ruled out contaminants and mineral structures, then she analyzed the putative. In one test rats were injected with the dinosaur fossil extract; the rodents produced antibodies that responded to turkey and rabbit hemoglobins. All the data supported the conclusion that the T-Rex fossil contained fragments of hemoglobin molecules. "The most likely source of these proteins is the once-living cells of the dinosaur," she wrote in a 1997 paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  
When a group of fossil hunters found a cluster of preserved bird eggs in a city dump in Neuquén, Argentina, they originally believed the shells contained nothing but sand. When the remains were analyzed by scanning electron and atomic force microscopes it was concluded that the 70-million-year-old eggs still held embryos containing intact collagen. 

Dr. Schweitzer published her findings in the journal Science.
 
"I invite the reader to step back and contemplate the obvious, this discovery gives immensely powerful support to the proposition that dinosaur fossils are not millions of years old at all, but were mostly fossilized under catastrophic conditions a few thousand years ago at most." - Carl Wieland