October 12, 2012 | David F. Coppedge

Upper Limit Set on DNA Age

Forget Jurassic Park; DNA cannot last anywhere near 65 million years, researchers say.

Using bone fragments from extinct Moa birds that died between 600 and 8,000 years ago, researchers from Denmark and Australia calculated a half-life of 521 years for DNA in fossils.  While slower than earlier estimates, this rate of decay would put an upper limit of 6.8 million years for the last trace of DNA, by which time all bonds would be broken.  The finding was reported by Nature News, Live Science, New Scientist and PhysOrg, which said:

This figure is incompatible with the idea of finding intact DNA in an 80 million year old dinosaur remnant, as was famously alluded to in the Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park, but is much older than the currently accepted record of 450,000 to 800,000-year-old DNA from Greenlandic ice cores.

Some scientists are holding out the possibility that DNA could last a little longer under different conditions, say, in caves or permafrost.  “The calculations in the latest study were quite straightforward, but many questions remain,” Nature News said.  The oldest DNA claimed is from Greenland ice cores said to date back 800,000 years.

Here’s a project for creation scientists: look for intact DNA in dinosaur bone.  It would militate against the idea that the bones are 65 million years old or older.  What impact would this have on the scientific community?  Unfortunately, probably none.  Creation scientists have found traces of carbon 14 in diamond and coal, even more impossible in the evolutionary timeline, and evolutionists totally ignored it.  This disorder, known as cognitive dissonance, is epidemic in the Darwin Party.  Outsiders, though, often take great interest and understand the implications, especially if it revives their hopes to go to Jurassic Park some day.  (That notion will have to be quelled with other considerations.)

 

 

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Comments

  • mmartin says:

    Very much Amen to the “look for intact DNA in dinosaur bone”, that would be very RATE 2.0. If i’m not mistaken Mary Schweitzer never let anyone outside the Darwin party play with her recovered soft tissue. So let’s go looking for some juicy T-Rex femur…

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