Soft Tissue Wars: Latest Inadequate Excuse

Four European scientists couldn’t find
original collagen in ichthyosaur bones,
but how hard did they look?

 

What can evolutionists do with an observable fact that undermines their foundation of Deep Time? Dinosaur soft tissue has been reported for decades now. They know it cannot survive for tens of millions of years. So they (1) ignore it, (2) make up stories about how it really could be millions of years old, or (3) say that it’s not what the scientists think it is. An example of the third tactic appeared in print last week. That’s not soft tissue, they say; it’s really minerals!

In Greek mythology, a glance at Medusa, an ugly female goddess with snakes for hair, could turn a man to stone. Four European scientists have revived the myth. Their Medusa is deep time. It turns fossil soft tissue to stone over hundreds of millions of years.

No Collagen Here, Mate

Medusa’s gaze: Cell traces and fibrils but no collagen in permineralized Jurassic ichthyosaur bone (17 Dec 2025, iScience). This team examined four samples of bone from ichthyosaur fossils found in France and the UK. The details of bone preservation were indeed remarkable, they confess. Even traces of individual cells and fibrils of collagen proteins were observable under the scanning electron microscope (SEM). But it was all mineralized; no soft tissue was found.

Despite the striking similarity of the fibrils to those in modern bone, we found no evidence of collagen preservation. Fossilization removed non-mineralized components and exposed trabecular surfaces at the mineralization front. Cellular activity in skeletal tissue, familiar to any medical student, is preserved for >200 million years, and probably longer in vertebrate fossils.

The paper includes two references to Mary Schweitzer’s work, including the bombshell discovery of soft tissue in a T. rex bone in 2005. Can they do away with all the other reports by examining just a few millimeter-sized samples from a few marine reptiles?

Although bone older than a few million years appears fully mineralized by fossilization processes, replacing the collagen with apatite mineral, a growing number of reports suggest that collagen can also be preserved in fossil bones from deep time.

They admit that “Despite the abundance of bone in the fossil record of the last 470 Ma, the process of its fossilization is poorly understood.”

One has to wonder, too, whether their methods of sectioning, bleaching, and acid-washing the bone removed the very soft-tissue evidence they should have been looking for.

Bone fibrils are not as clearly visible on the etched surfaces as are the fibrils on the free inner surfaces (Figure S4A). Also, the fibril arrangement is more difficult to detect on the etched surfaces. There are several reasons for this: first, fibril diameter after etching is smaller than that of the fibrils observed directly on the internal trabecular surfaces without etching (Figure S3A). So far, in the SEM we have only observed the fibrils on etched surfaces after Au/Pd coating, and we were not able to resolve their fine structure. Second, depending on the angle with which the fibrils intersect the fracture or polished section surface, they may appear as short fibril segments or as small ‘dots’ rather than as continuous features (Figures S4A and S9B). Third, etching with strong acid may result in undesirable local phosphate mineral reprecipitation during or at the termination of the etching process. This reprecipitation can obscure the surfaces to be studied. In addition, etching leads to pit artifacts that enlarge existing holes and, in particular, cracks (Figure S4A)….

In conclusion, since the internal structure of the bone and cartilage matrix is not apparent in natural fracture surfaces and section surfaces, phosphoric acid may be used to reveal them. However, as in any etching process of mineralized tissues, artifacts always need to be taken into account, unlike in the preserved natural internal surfaces that in the case of the open bone porosity do not require any treatment for SEM observation at all.

Weaknesses in the Study

1. Faulty comparison. They found that the ichthyosaur samples were very similar to bone samples of rat and porpoise that were “made anorganic” by removal of collagen and other proteins.

2. Faulty logic. They did not, however, compare the ichthyosaur samples with tissues from modern animals that still contained soft tissue after having been buried a few thousand years ago, or from samples in the literature of dinosaur-era bones containing soft tissue.

3. Deep Time bias: They assumed deep time. “Given the great temporal spread and different geological backgrounds of our samples (Table 1), we suggest that the kind of preservation we document is widespread, if not the norm, in fossil bone from deep time.”

4. Darwinian bias: Their belief in deep time and unquestioned loyalty to Darwinism clouds their thinking. They should have predicted evolutionary changes over hundreds of millions of years. Not finding it, they still believed in evolution!

Although the principle of uniformitarianism and, more specifically, phylogenetic inference, would suggest that the cellular mechanisms of bone formation are ancient, direct proof had been lacking. Our observations confirm that the cellular mechanisms of periosteal and endochondral bone formation and resorption, i.e., the basics of bone growth and turnover, were exactly the same 200 million years ago as they are in living amniotes.

Is this a proof or a goof? It is proof that the fossilized animal possessed the same mechanisms of bone formation as those of living amniotes, but not that the bone was 200 million years old. The error is found in “phylogenetic inference”—a Darwinian assumption. Watch how the assumption of phylogeny led to cognitive dissonance:

If we were to compare the bone cell activity present in the four ichthyosaur specimens with what is known about remodeling in mammals, and in particular in humans, we would conclude that OV2, AB1, and LR1 exhibit the classic remodeling activity characteristic of relatively young and healthy animals, albeit with reservations given the significant phylogenetic gap separating these two groups.

5. Faulty understanding. They stated that there was no evolution in bone growth for 200 million years! Should they not have questioned, rather, if all the fossil bones found throughout the fossil record are really hundreds of millions of years old? Darwinians always promise “understanding” but they refuse to think outside the box of their own materialistic, uniformitarian, deep time worldview (28 May 2021). Look at them wander about in the fogma, thinking they are getting somewhere:

Given that fossil bone preservation has varied little since the origin of bone as a tissue 460 million years ago, our work opens up perspectives on a deeper understanding of the evolutionary origin of amniote osteogenesis and vertebrate osteogenesis in general in the Silurian and Devonian.

Proposing that their work “opens up perspectives on a deeper understanding” of something but not questioning their assumption of deep time shows a lack of understanding. They should have asked, ‘How could a supposed inexorable process of evolution that, after the extinction of dinosaurs, led to almost all modern animals with their astounding diversity and complexity have left the processes of osteogenesis unchanged for 460 million years? Could our belief in evolution be wrong? Could deep time be a myth?’

6. Incomplete sampling. They have not sampled adequate numbers of fossil bones. Why didn’t they try to replicate the techniques used by Mary Schweitzer and others who found intact collagen in dinosaur bones? Why didn’t they test land dinosaur bones, and only those of marine reptiles?

7. Incomplete tissues. In the famous ‘B Rex’ presentation on 60 Minutes, Schweitzer demonstrated stretchy soft tissue and samples that looked like blood vessels and blood cells in a T. rex femur. The host was shocked and emitted an audible gasp. Why didn’t this team look for those? In one paragraph, the authors admit that other soft tissues have been reported. Referring to Schweitzer’s work and another report, they say:

Despite the abundance of bone in the fossil record of the last 470 Ma [million years], the process of its fossilization is poorly understood. Observation of petrographic thin sections in polarized light reveals that bone histology is almost always well preserved, independently of the age of the fossil. Also, by careful digestion with weak acids, fossil bone tissue up to 290 Ma old will commonly release osteocytes, blood vessels, and extracellular matrix, albeit in a degraded state. This preservation of organics in bone tissue may have inspired the interpretation that fossil fibrils represent the mineralized collagen fibrils, retaining some or all of the collagen, either as the preserved macromolecule or in a degraded organic form. We question this interpretation and hypothesize instead that the fossil fibrils only correspond to the mineral skeleton of bone fibrils without any organic remains.

This is like saying, “Earlier reports indicated the presence of gasoline in the carburetor, fuel pump and pistons. We looked in the pistons and didn’t find any gasoline there.” It would be a non-sequitur to conclude that the absence of collagen in their limited bone samples from a limited number of fossils indicates that soft tissue was not present in other parts of the fossils. See Brian Thomas’s list of published reports of soft tissue in ancient fossils.

8. Inadequate research done. They take refuge in futureware. “Future work using methods of molecular paleontology will test our hypothesis.” Well, then, they should have waited to publish till after their work is done, because their incomplete study left the misleading impression that ancient soft tissue is not what it seems.

Given the above weaknesses, their study is far from definitive. Their paragraph on “Limitations of the Study” (reproduced below) shows that there are plenty of objections to be lodged against their ‘no collagen’ finding.

Limitations of the study

Given the great temporal spread and different geological backgrounds of our samples (Table 1), we suggest that the kind of preservation we document is widespread, if not the norm, in fossil bone from deep time. However, testing this hypothesis requires broad sampling across the vertebrate fossil record, which we yet have to conduct. Whereas we have gained a clear comparative understanding of the naturally deproteinized inner bone surfaces (forming, resting, and resorbing) down to the bone fibrils of the fossils, we do not yet fully understand the interior structure of the fossil bone fibrils and of the fossil bone tissue below the fibril level of integration. We and others have imaged fluorapatite crystallites via TEM inside fossil bone tissue,but we do not know what the relationship of these crystallites is with the bone fibrils and the space in between fibrils. Given the ubiquitous observations in polarized light microscopy of fibril preservation in fossil bone, we must assume that the apatite crystallites are somehow related to the original bone fibrils. We now have the techniques to address this question with spatially controlled FIB-SEM sampling followed by TEM investigation. Although fossil cartilage has consistently been observed with the light microscope across the amniote tree and deep time, it is clear that cartilage fossilization must be more complex than bone fossilization because of the more variable degree of mineralization of cartilage vs. bone. The conclusions we have drawn from the differences in bone cell activity are currently limited and need to be confirmed. This is due to the paucity of data in the literature, requiring more SEM observations of systematically and temporally diverse fossil specimens. Furthermore, our observations are currently of a qualitative nature. Quantification will employ automated SEM imaging to cover large fields of view with sufficient resolution to detect fibril organization combined with automated image analysis.

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Update 2 Jan 2024: At The Conversation today, 3 Darwinists claim that a fossil ichthyosaur from New Zealand “sheds light” on the evolution of these marine reptiles. “They evolved separately around 250 million years ago, possibly from a crocodile-like ancestor, to resemble fish and modern dolphins,” they say. But the new fossil shows “surprising evolutionary links” with other similar ichthyosaurs, because it displays “several distinctive features” that differ from other ichthyosaur fossils, even though they came from the same region.

Interestingly, this specimen appears to be unrelated to the ichthyosaurs of Western Gondwana, in modern-day South America. This was unexpected, as 98 million years ago South America and New Zealand were certainly closer to each other than to Europe….

This contradicts what is seen in the slightly younger fossils of other marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs and mosasaurs, which show evolutionary links between South America, Antarctica and New Zealand. It is possible these links began after ichthyosaurs became extinct.

This implies that if the ichthyosaur fossils had been similar, they would have shown evolutionary links. But since they were different, they “shed light on evolution.” Either way, they evolved. Darwin can’t lose!