Dear Young Earth Creationists, No Dinosaur Soft Tissue Has Ever Been Found
I just wanted to do this video to clear up an issue which young earth creationists have been promoting for some time that is absolutely misleading and completely untrue. Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer did not find fresh, soft tissue in dinosaur bones. In fact, no actual soft tissue has ever been found inside a dinosaur bone.
I know what you may have heard on 60 Minutes or on the news, but don't go off to another YouTube video just yet, let me explain. First of all, I'm not interested in the age of the dinosaur bones Schweitzer found, so please, lets not go off on that tangent, the issue I'm dealing with here is strictly whether or not there has ever been a dinosaur bone cracked open and had soft tissue come oozing out. In my research, I can not find a single example of that ever happening.
What has been discovered, and it is very strange indeed and unexpected, is that some dinosaur bones after being sliced microscopically thin or ground into a powder and then demineralized by soaking in a bath of ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid for up to 2 months, did exhibit microscopically small bits of soft tissue.
But please understand, this "soft tissue" when first discovered in these fossilized bones was as solid as a rock. It was as hard and dried out as the bone and minerals surrounding it. This so-called, "soft tissue" had to be extracted, in a controlled laboratory setting in a 2 month long process. It was not soft when found. No bones containing fresh, soft tissue has ever been found.
What has happened here is that young earth creationists have hijacked this discovery and are promoting something through various articles, videos, forum posts and social media comments that is absolutely not true. Several Christian ministries such as Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research and other YEC groups have engaged in misleading people into thinking dinosaur bones were discovered, broken open and soft tissue was right there oozing out like fresh bone marrow.
In one of the original papers written by Mary Schweitzer in 1996 on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website she writes that, "Tissues were extracted by grinding the bone to a fine powder in sterile, baked mortars and pestles and then adding various extraction buffers" and further on her original article at the National Institutes of Health that the 60 Minutes story was taken from, she again writes, "After two months of demineralization, pigmented vessels were present in some fragments. A sheath of crystalline material was present on some bone surfaces after prolonged exposure to ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA)."
I've included a link to 2 of Mary Schweitzer's original papers, free from the bias of Answers in Genesis and surprisingly 60 Minutes and other media outlets who have sensationalized and completely misrepresented this story.
I'd love to discus this issue so please leave your comments in the comment section below, but please don't ask me about my thoughts on the age of the dinosaur bones in question. I'm not really interested in the age, I just want to hopefully stop people from promoting misleading information on what this discovery entails. The age of the dinosaur bones in question is not really the point of this video.
Thanks for watching, please leave your comments below.
Heme compounds in dinosaur trabecular bone
http://www.pnas.org/content/94/12/629...
Received October 15, 1996.
Soft tissue and cellular preservation in vertebrate skeletal elements from the Cretaceous to the present
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
published January 22, 2007