God, Science and the Bible: Nonfossilized soft tissue found in dinosaur bones
Dinosaur researchers the world over were stunned by the announcement in March that a 70-million-year-old tyrannosaurus rex fossilized leg bone had yielded very unfossilized soft tissue—apparently blood vessels and blood cells—something long thought impossible considering the assumed age of such fossils.
Dinosaur researchers the world over were stunned by the announcement in March that a 70-million-year-old tyrannosaurus rex fossilized leg bone had yielded very unfossilized soft tissue—apparently blood vessels and blood cells—something long thought impossible considering the assumed age of such fossils.
The methods that yielded the soft tissue "seem to upend accepted theories of fossilization," reported the Chicago Tribune March 24. "Conventional wisdom suggests that when animals like dinosaurs died millions of years ago and were covered in silty mud, inert earth minerals gradually seeped into bony tissues and replaced all organic material. The minerals transformed the bone into fossil rock, supposedly destroying any soft tissue."
BBC News Online further explained: "Normally when an animal dies, worms and bugs will quickly eat up anything that is soft. Then, as the remaining bone material gets buried deeper and deeper in the mud, it gets heated, crushed and replaced by minerals, turning it to stone."
How was this amazing discovery made? For years Mary Higby Schweitzer, a paleontologist at North Carolina State University and Montana State University, had experimented with chemically dissolving the minerals in fossils—long assumed to be 100 percent mineral—to study any residue left behind.
She recently worked on a three-inch chunk of fossilized femur from a well-preserved tyrannosaurus rex recently uncovered in Montana. When she and her assistant dissolved the stone in the fossil, what they found was "stretchy bone matrix material that, when examined microscopically, seemed to show blood vessels, osteocytes, or bone building cells, and other recognizable organic features."
They repeated the experiment 17 times before they were convinced what they were seeing was indeed actual tyrannosaurus rex tissue. They continued the process with other fossils, discovering similar material in bones from two other tyrannosaurs and an 80-million-year-old hadrosaur.
"They were all preserved a little bit differently than each other, but they all contained very similar material we found in the T. rex," she reported. As a result, finding such material in dinosaur bones may "not be as rare an event as we thought."
For years paleontologists have held that organic materials such as animal remains could not be preserved beyond about 100,000 years. "We may not really know as much about how fossils are preserved as we think," says Schweitzer (Agence France-Presse, March 29). That is quite an understatement.
Regrettably, this amazing discovery doesn't seem to have prompted paleontologists to ask the obvious question: Are dating theories and methods anywhere near as reliable as scientists have assumed they are?
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Tom Robinson
Tom is an elder in the United Church of God who works from his home near St. Louis, Missouri as managing editor and senior writer for Beyond Today magazine, church study guides and the UCG Bible Commentary. He is a visiting instructor at Ambassador Bible College. And he serves as chairman of the church's Prophecy Advisory Committee and a member of the Fundamental Beliefs Amendment Committee.
Tom began attending God's Church at the age of 16 in 1985 and was baptized a year later. He attended Ambassador College in both Texas and California and served for a year as a history teacher at the college's overseas project in Sri Lanka. He graduated from the Texas campus in 1992 with a Bachelor of Arts in theology along with minors in English and mass communications. Since 1994, he has been employed as an editor and writer for church publications and has served in local congregations through regular preaching of sermons.
Tom was ordained to the ministry in 2012 and attends the Columbia-Fulton, Missouri congregation with his wife Donna and their two teen children.
Mario Seiglie
Mr. Seiglie was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to the United States when he was a child. He found out about the Church when he was 17 from a Church member in high school. He went to Ambassador College in Big Sandy, Texas, and in Pasadena, California, graduating with degrees in theology and Spanish. He serves as the pastor of the Garden Grove, CA UCG congregation and serves in the Spanish speaking areas of South America. He also writes for the Beyond Today magazine and currently serves on the UCG Council of Elders. He and his wife, Caty, have four grown daughters, and grandchildren.
Scott Ashley
Scott Ashley was managing editor of Beyond Today magazine, United Church of God booklets and its printed Bible Study Course until his retirement in 2023. He also pastored three congregations in Colorado for 10 years from 2011-2021. He and his wife, Connie, live near Denver, Colorado.
Mr. Ashley attended Ambassador College in Big Sandy, Texas, graduating in 1976 with a theology major and minors in journalism and speech. It was there that he first became interested in publishing, an industry in which he worked for 50 years.
During his career, he has worked for several publishing companies in various capacities. He was employed by the United Church of God from 1995-2023, overseeing the planning, writing, editing, reviewing and production of Beyond Today magazine, several dozen booklets/study guides and a Bible study course covering major biblical teachings. His special interests are the Bible, archaeology, biblical culture, history and the Middle East.
