UPDATE ON CONTROVERSY OVER BLOOD AND DNA FOUND IN DINOSAUR BONES

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by Bill Nugent
Article #265


We’re closer to Jurassic Park. DNA has been found in dinosaur bones!

While excavating a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton from a cliff in the Hell’s Creek formation in Northwestern Montana in 2000, Bob Harmon and his team of paleontologists did something unusual. They broke the T. Rex leg bone in two. They said they had to break it in order to remove it by helicopter.

When they looked into the core of the bone they saw what appeared to be remnants of blood and soft tissue. They sent the find to Dr. Mary Schweitzer, a respected paleontologist of North Carolina State University, who had discovered blood remnants in dinosaur bones in the past.

Schweitzer and her team confirmed the finding of soft tissue and blood remnants in the bone. She was low key about the find yet it gained wide publicity even in the mainstream media. On March 24, 2005, MSNBC aired a documentary about the find and showed Schweitzer dissolving tissue in EDTA which is a chemical that breaks down the hard calcium that surrounds the soft tissue. The TV documentary showed, in live action, the bending and flexing of the soft tissue from the dinosaur bone.

There was a storm of controversy among old earth evolutionists who insisted that Schweitzer found nothing more than biofilm left by bacteria. Scientists know that no soft tissue of any kind could possibly be preserved in a dinosaur bone for 65 million years. Soft tissue is composed of highly complex and relatively unstable biopolymers such as proteins that would breakdown in far less time than even one million years. If it is indeed dinosaur soft tissue, then science will have to rethink the whole paradigm of the age of the dinosaurs and by extension, the age of the earth itself!

Schweitzer defended her work and did even more in-depth chemical analyses of the contents of the centers of dinosaur bones. According to the article: “Molecular Analyses of Dinosaur Osteocytes Support the Presence of Endogenous Molecules” by M. H. Schweitzer et al. Bone, 52 no. 1 (2013): 414-423 as reported in Perspective, Answers Magazine, April-June 2013, 9-10, Schweitzer found bone forming cells, called osteocytes, that are found only in bony creatures and are not from bacteria. This clearly undermines the claim that the soft tissue is bacterial biofilm.

Furthermore, she identified several proteins found only in bony creatures and most importantly, she found DNA. The DNA strands were identified as that which comes from a vertebrate and hence not bacterial in origin. The presence of dinosaur DNA in the bones strongly refutes the bacterial biofilm theory.

The Perspective column in Answers cited above, cites scientific studies that show that even under laboratory conditions DNA is unstable and breaks down quickly. One study of dated fossils showed a DNA half life of just 521 years. A half life of 521 years means DNA degrades so fast that it should not be detectible after just 12,000 years.

Most dinosaur bones are not really fossilized in the sense of petrification. Petrification occurs when silica infiltrates bone and dissolves away the calcium and replaces it with rock hard silicon. Petrification can happen quickly under certain conditions. Petrification has been seen to occur rapidly in modern times in a situation of hot volcanic ash. Most of the dinosaur bones you see in museum displays are not petrified but are composed of the calcium and phosphorous of natural bone.

Blood remnants and soft tissue remains have been found in dinosaur bones of several species. This strongly infers that dinosaur bones could not possibly be even one million years old. The young earth creationist position is that dinosaur carcasses were buried by sediments such as sand, clay and lime soon after death. These vast sedimentary deposits were laid down by the worldwide flood of Noah’s day that killed large numbers of land creatures. The sediments that buried the dinosaur carcasses hardened into sandstone and limestone. The biblical flood occurred, according to the Bible’s timeline, less than 5,000 years ago. This is consistent with the finding of small remnants of blood, soft tissue and DNA in dinosaur bones.

We have proof of the young age of dinosaurs and this, of course, wildly throws off the old earth evolutionary timeline. If dinosaurs lived, in large numbers, as recently as five thousand years ago it gives compelling proof that dinosaurs and other creatures did not evolve over eons of time. Dinosaurs, like all creatures, were created by God in fairly recent time.

A young age of dinosaurs is consistent with a young age of earth. The age of earth must be established by many other scientific avenues of proof. I’ve written about many young earth proofs in previous DTF articles. One such proof of young earth is the rapid rate of the decline of the strength of the earth’s magnetic field. The earth’s magnetic field has a half life of about 1400 years. If you extrapolate back just 20,000 years, the earth’s magnetic field would have been so strong back then as a starting point, that the earth’s magnetic field would have been as strong as that of a magnetic star. The high heat of such a strong magnetic field would have made life impossible. The magnetic field caps earth’s age at about 10,000 years or less.

The age of earth of less than 10,000 years is fatal to Darwinism which requires millions of years for life to evolve. Unfortunately, the concept of young earth is so far outside the mainstream of modern thought that even to talk about young earth will sometimes alienate your listeners. However, as the mounting evidence for young earth piles up, I’m confident that eventually the persistent mindset of old earth uniformitarianism will be reversed both in academia and among operational geologists.

The upshot is that the earth itself is evidence of the actions of the Creator. We must honor the Creator and be prepared to meet Him in the afterlife. The Bible declares that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah of Israel. The fact that Jesus is Messiah is backed up by His fulfillment of over 300 Old Testament prophecies and by other supernatural, miraculous signs. Jesus died for our sins, taking upon Himself the penalty we deserved for our sins. Forgiveness is found only through Christ. Call upon Christ today to receive forgiveness of sins!

 



(C) 2016 William P. Nugent, permission granted to email or republish for Christian outreach.

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