How long can soft tissue last in fossils? The experimental evidence is that it could not last millions of years. In desperation Mary Schweitzer tried preserving a tissue sample in concentrated blood but the results are unconvincing and the setup contrived. But there has been soft tissue found in dinosaur fossils. The latest claim from N Carolina State University is 180 million years! Seriously; soft tissue is more consistent with a Biblical time scale.
@Carazaa [quote]In desperation Mary Schweitzer tried preserving a tissue sample in concentrated blood[/quote] What is "concentrated blood"? A haematologist friend has never heard of it.
@Sharon I am not a blood expert but the article below explains different concentrations and Mary Schwetzer is the researcher who found the soft tissue in fossils so there are many articles explaining her researchonline.
Osmolality (Blood) - Health Encyclopedia - University of ...
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/...
This test measures the concentration of dissolved particles (osmolality) in your blood. This test can help diagnose a fluid or electrolyte imbalance, including dehydration. Electrolytes are mineral salts that help move nutrients into your cells and waste products out of your cells.
@Carazaa [quote]soft tissue found in dinosaur fossils[/quote]
Soft tissue has [b]never[/b] been found in dinosaur fossils
Not even Schweizer makes that claim... like any creationist she relies on general public ignorance, uses innuendo and suggestion, and lets assumption do its work.
I am more than happy to walk you through Schweitzer’s sophistry, should you so wish
@Carazaa In the early 90s Schweitzer saw some fossilised structures that she thought might be the mineralised remnants of red blood cells. She used spectroscopic tests to identify organic compounds that were consistent with heme (heme is a small, relatively stable iron-containing molecule which gives blood its red colour and is the key oxygen-carrying component of the haemoglobin protein. For example, Dale Greenwalt has identified mineralised heme in the abdomen of a 46-million-year-old mosquito fossil)
Schweitzer injected powdered dinosaur bone into laboratory mice, and their immune responses suggested that the mineralised structures were heme… not the entire haemoglobin protein, but only a tiny fragment of the protein, possibly just 3 or 4 amino acids.
Just to be clear, [i]Schweitzer’s own assessment[/i] of these objects was that they were not actual red blood cells (e.g. with cell walls or other cellular structures), but rather some chemically mineralised remnants of the dinosaur blood
To repeat... soft tissue has [b]never[/b] been found in dinosaur fossils
@Carazaa Does that suffice for you to now understand that soft tissue has [b]never[/b] been found in dinosaur fossils?
Perhaps you need more detail in order to understand that whoever led you tp believe that soft tissue has ever been found in dinosaur fossils was, in fact, lying to you. Deceiving you. Inviting you to fool yourself, in the hope that you would then fool others.
@Bushranger Most likely in the same way that creationist claims are always played out once exposed for the deceitful pap they invariably turn out to be... there will be a long silence, followed by the sound of footsteps moving rapidly down a long corridor, followed by the sound of a door slamming, followed by silence
@Sharon @Bushranger @newjaninev2 Did you look up the latest research Mary did. She is a evolutionist and a paleontologist, and she is confused of the soft tissue in fossils that they thought were millions of years old but soft tissue doesn't last more than a few thousand years and not millions of years. Of course evolutionists and people against the Bible will come up with explanations but sooner or later they realize the Bible is right after all. Confusion was her emotion she said, and she has to ""rethink fossil age now"
@Carazaa Just to make sure we are comparing apples with apples, could you provide a link to the research you are talking about please? That way we can be sure that we are addressing the same topic.
@Carazaa Note that Schweizer is a devout evangelical Christian (self-confessed). That aside, I will repeat... soft tissue has [b]never[/b] been found in fossils. Not even Schweizer makes that claim (unlike you, apparently).
What is identified, by Schweizer, Greenwait, and many others is [i]fossilised[/i] traces of organic molecules, in this case iron-stabilized heme. The possibility that fossilised iron-stabilized heme might be identifiable has long been known, but it is through advances in mass-spectrometry analysis that this has now become possible. The only interesting aspect of Schweitzer’s work is that the role of iron in preserving some organic molecules during the fossilisation process has now been confirmed.
The mass-spectrometry analysis identifies various fossilised proteins, including collagen, actin, and tubulin. These are known to have structures which are resistant to degradation, especially when they are crosslinked, and tests indicate that these proteins from the dinosaur bones are indeed highly crosslinked, which appears to be a key aspect of their longevity.
In all these cases, tissue has been replaced by minerals, so this is [i]not[/i] the preservation of organic soft tissue, but rather the preservation of the detailed physical forms of the original soft tissues. This is interesting, but it is also well-understood.
It is also a very long way distant from ‘soft tissue found in fossilised bones’
@newjaninev2 What in the world are you saying. You are super smart but you change the facts lady🙂
I quote from one article.
[b] "Soft tissue fossil clues could help search for ancient life on Earth and other planets
by University of Oxford
Soft tissue fossil clues could help search for ancient life on Earth and other planets Credit: University of Oxford
Fossils that preserve entire organisms (including both hard and soft body parts) are critical to our understanding of evolution and ancient life on Earth. However, these exceptional deposits are extremely rare. The fossil record is heavily biased towards the preservation of harder parts of organisms, such as shells, teeth and bones, as soft parts such as internal organs, eyes, or even completely soft organisms, like worms, tend to decay before they can be fossilised. Little is known about the environmental conditions which stop this process soon enough for the organism to be fossilised." [/b]
Sorry carazaa, but you've misunderstood the article.
It's talking about the fossilization of soft tissue like skin or wing membranes or soft bodied animals like jellyfish. It's not referring to [i]still[/i] soft tissue present in fossils.
@Carazaa Soft tissue [i]fossil clues[/i] i.e. soft tissue that has been mineralised, and is now no different from the other parts of the fossilised corpse. Furthermore, the only soft tissues that become fossilised are those containing, or with access to, iron. Of those original soft tissues, [i]none of which are preserved intact[/i], only a small number of cross-linked organic molecules are fossilised, and it is those which provide clues as to what the now-vanished soft tissues may have been like.
Unless those organic molecules are fossilised (a rare event, and subject to the conditions I have laid out here), they are not preserved by being mineralised. In fact, Dale Greenwalt speaks about this in the paper I cited for you.
To repeat... soft tissue has [b]never[/b] been found in dinosaur fossils.
That’s a fact that no amount of creationist misrepresentation can ever change, lady.
@Pikachu She seems to think that one could scoop out the soft tissue and whip up a quick hamburger! In fact, as I have said, all that remains are certain fossilised organic molecules which probably formed a small part of the original tissue, and even those are detectable only through mass-spectrometry analysis, and observable only through high-resolution microscopy.
It's not talking about still soft tissue. It even mentions the burgess shales as examples of the kind of fossils being discussed. Those are fossils of soft-bodied animals from the cambrian sea which luckily fossilized. Their soft tissue is [i][b]not[/b][/i] still soft.
This article doesn't say what you think it does. If you disagree then i suggest you read through it more carefully.
The controversial discovery of 68-million-year-old soft tissue from the bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex finally has a physical explanation. According to new research, iron in the dinosaur's body preserved the tissue before it could decay.
The research, headed by Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist [/b][b]at North Carolina State University, explains how proteins — and possibly even DNA — can survive millennia. Schweitzer and her colleagues first raised this question in 2005, when they found the seemingly impossible: soft tissue preserved inside the leg of an adolescent T. rex unearthed in Montana.
"What we found was unusual, because it was still soft and still transparent and still flexible," Schweitzer told LiveScience.
T. rex tissue?
The find was also controversial, because scientists had thought proteins that make up soft tissue should degrade in less than 1 million years in the best of conditions. In most cases, microbes feast on a dead animal's soft tissue, destroying it within weeks. The tissue must be something else, perhaps the product of a later bacterial invasion, critics argued.
Then, in 2007, Schweitzer and her colleagues analyzed the chemistry of the T. rex proteins. They found the proteins really did come from dinosaur soft tissue. The tissue was collagen, they reported in the journal Science, and it shared similarities with bird collagen — which makes sense, as modern birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs such as T. rex.
The researchers also analyzed other fossils for the presence of soft tissue, and found it was present in about half of their samples going back to the Jurassic Period, which lasted from 145.5 million to 199.6 million years ago, Schweitzer said.
"The problem is, for 300 years, we thought, 'Well, the organics are all gone, so why should we look for something that's not going to be there?' and nobody looks," she said.
The obvious question, though, was how soft, pliable tissue could [/b][b]survive for millions of years. In a new study published today (Nov. 26) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Schweitzer thinks she has the answer: Iron.
Iron lady
Iron is an element present in abundance in the body, particularly in the blood, where it is part of the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. Iron is also highly reactive with other molecules, so the body keeps it locked up tight, bound to molecules that prevent it from wreaking havoc on the tissues.
After death, though, iron is let free from its cage. It forms minuscule iron nanoparticles and also generates free radicals, which are highly reactive molecules thought to be involved in aging.
"The free radicals cause proteins and cell membranes to tie in knots," Schweitzer said. "They basically act like formaldehyde."
Formaldehyde, of course, preserves tissue. It works by linking up, or cross-linking, the amino acids that make up proteins, which makes those proteins more resistant to decay.
Schweitzer and her colleagues found that dinosaur soft tissue is closely associated with iron nanoparticles in both the T. rex and another soft-tissue specimen from Brachylophosaurus canadensis, a type of duck-billed dinosaur. They then tested the iron-as-preservative idea using modern ostrich blood vessels. They soaked one group of blood vessels in iron-rich liquid made of red blood cells and another group in water. The blood vessels left in water turned into a disgusting mess within days. The blood vessels soaked in red blood cells remain recognizable after sitting at room temperature for two years. [Paleo-Art: Illustrations Bring Dinosaurs to Life]
Searching for soft tissue
Dinosaurs' iron-rich blood, combined with a good environment for fossilization, may explain the amazing existence of soft tissue from the Cretaceous (a period that lasted from about 65.5 million to 145.5 million years ago) and even earlier. The specimens Schweitzer works with, including skin, show evidence of excellent preservation. The bones of these various specimens are articulated, not scattered, suggesting they were buried quickly. They're also buried in sandstone, which is porous and may wick away bacteria and reactive enzymes that would otherwise degrade the bone.
Schweitzer is set to search for more dinosaur soft tissue this summer. "I'd like to find a honking big T. rex that's completely articulated that's still in the ground, or something similar," she said. To preserve the chemistry of potential soft tissue, the [/b][b]specimens must not be treated with preservatives or glue, as most fossil bones are, she said. And they need to be tested quickly, as soft tissue could degrade once exposed to modern air and humidity.
Importantly, Schweitzer and her colleagues have figured out how to remove the iron from their samples, which enables them to analyze the original proteins. They've even found chemicals consistent with being DNA, though Schweitzer is quick to note that she hasn't proven they really are DNA. The iron-removing techniques should allow paleontologists to search more effectively for soft tissue, and to test it when they find it.
"Once we can get the chemistry behind some of these soft tissues, there's all sorts of questions we can ask of ancient organisms," Schweitzer said.
Editor's Note: This article was updated at 2pm Eastern Nov. 28 to correct unclear language about proteins and DNA.
Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience." [/b]
