Proteins Found Preserved in T. rex Bone

Preserved fragments of collagen have been found in a dinosaur bone alleged to be 68 million years old.  Read all about it in Science Daily.  Analysis of soft tissue found by Mary Schweitzer and team turned up the recognizable protein fragments.  Protein was also detected in soft tissue from a mastodon said to be half a million years old.
    “When an animal dies, protein immediately begins to degrade and, in the case of fossils, is slowly replaced by mineral,” the article states.  “This substitution process was thought to be complete by 1 million years.”  Here’s how the original paper in Science¹ put it:

It has long been assumed that the process of fossilization results in the destruction of virtually all original organic components of an organism, and it has been hypothesized that original molecules will be either lost or altered to the point of nonrecognition over relatively short time spans (well under a million years).  However, the discovery of intact structures retaining original transparency, flexibility, and other characteristics in specimens dating at least to the Cretaceous suggested that, under certain conditions, remnant organic constituents may persist across geological time.

Veteran dinosaur hunter John Horner was a co-author of the paper.  MSNBC News mentioned that he’s sending 100 people on nine research teams to look for more examples of soft tissue preservation.  Schweitzer kept a positive spin on this surprising finding.  She said in the Science Daily article, “This information will help us learn more about evolutionary relationships, about how preservation happens, and about how molecules degrade over time, which could have important applications in medicine.”
    This story is being widely reported, such as on National Geographic, the BBC, Associated Press and Live Science.  News@Nature admitted in a caption, No one thought protein from a 68-million-year-old bone could be preserved.”  All but Science Daily, however, gave the most prominence to the part of the story alleging this is evidence of an evolutionary relationship between dinosaurs and birds.  Shocked as they are about the preservation of soft tissue and protein, not one of the articles questioned the age of 68 million years.

¹Schweitzer et al., “Analyses of Soft Tissue from Tyrannosaurus rex Suggest the Presence of Protein,” Science, 13 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5822, pp. 277-280, DOI: 10.1126/science.1138709.

How can they completely ignore the big question?  Don’t just tell us this stuff did survive for millions of years—tell us how it could.  Why should anyone accept the premise of long ages any longer in light of this powerful evidence against it?  What do they think we are, a bunch of silly dupes who believe every yarn just because a “scientist” says so?  What’s more, many of the reports are spinning the story to promote even more evolutionary ideas.  They are claiming the collagen protein sequence proves the evolutionary ancestry of dinosaurs and birds.  Look: if this collagen is young, there was no evolutionary relationship.  Get it?
    What should have shocked and humbled the scientific community after decades of their now-falsified tales of dinosaurs being millions of years old has only fossilized the soft tissue of their consciences into rock-headedness.  Read these articles in disbelief.  Notice how nothing in secular science is fixed in stone except for faith in evolution and its requirement, “geological time.”
    Meanwhile, Motorola pagers across the country are buzzing with the MSNBC spin, “T-rex analysis supports dino-bird link – For the first time, researchers have read what they say is the biological signature of a tyrannosaur, a signature that confirms the increasingly accepted view that modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs.”  *Sigh.*
    It just never ends.  USA Today exclaimed, “Yesterday’s T rex is Today’s Chicken”.  Oh, barf.  What’s next, an ad for a five-year supply of McNuggets?