Do Dead Dinosaurs Bleed?

Nature finally admits that
dinosaur soft tissue is real but
refuses to give up on Deep Time

 

Counter-evidence does not always change a person’s dogma. In a well-known fable illustrating this, a man tells his doctor, “I’m dead.” The doctor, convinced by observation that the patient is very much alive, asks him, “Do dead men bleed?” “No,” the patient replies. “Dead men do not bleed.” Upon this reply, the doctor gives the man a poke with a sterile needle, and a drop of blood oozes out of his finger. “We’ll, I’ll be!” exclaims the patient. “Dead men do bleed!”

Did evidence change the patient’s opinion? Well, yes and no!

See if that proverb applies to a story printed by Nature this week.

Fossilized dinosaur cells that defied the ravages of time — 20 years since a key discovery (Nature News and Views, 17 March 2025). The Darwin-loyal scientific community is adamant that dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. ‘Old dead dinosaurs do not bleed,’ they insisted in effect. Every part of a dinosaur fossil should have long ago been replaced by minerals. After so much time, no original tissue could possibly have remained. Then, in 2005, Dr Mary Schweitzer found stretchy blood vessels inside the femur of a T. rex. Watch the reaction of a Darwin Party reporter and a leading dinosaur paleontologist in this clip from the CBS program 60 Minutes that aired shortly after the discovery was published.

Dr Schweitzer’s discovery was not the first. Other reports of dinosaur soft tissue had been published earlier, but hers was the one that made the biggest media splash. Since 2005, numerous other reports have been published. Dr Brian Thomas at ICR keeps a list, now with over 100 entries.  Some entries are from fossils alleged to be over a billion years old!

CEH has been sharing many reports of dinosaur soft tissue since Schweitzer’s paper. But the Darwinist Deep Time consensus, intent on refuting the soft tissue claims, has tried every possible angle to show that dead dinosaurs do not bleed. They have claimed contamination. They have alleged that biofilms in the bone mimic original dinosaur tissue. They have imagined weird chemistry—anything but believe that it is real, original dinosaur soft tissue. They have run out of options.

Now, the leading scientific journal is admitting, 20 years late, that dead dinosaurs do bleed.

Although there had been a number of reports of soft tissues and biomolecular fragments extracted from fossils from the Mesozoic era (252 million to 65 million years ago) and Palaeozoic era (538 million to 252 million years ago), it was a landmark paper published in Science in 2005 by Mary Schweitzer and colleagues that prompted palaeontologists, chemists, geologists, astrobiologists and evolutionary biologists to question previous assumptions about the limitations of the fossil record.

That Nature would “question previous assumptions” on this subject represents the turning of a corner in the history of science. Here are some of the admissions author Jasmina Wiemann makes in this article:

• The proteins in the fossil are original, primordial tissue.
• “Surprisingly,” this includes “flexible, pliable, and translucent” organic cellular and vascular structures in a fibrous meshwork in tyrannosaur and hadrosaur dinosaur bones.
• The “reported preservation of biomolecules directly contradicted existing decay models.” In other words, the consensus was wrong.
• The material includes “remarkable preservation down to the subcellular level” of original tissue.
• The material includes “structures similar to bone cells (osteocytes), blood vessels with surface marks resembling junctions between endothelial cells and containing possible cell nuclei, and patches of fibrous extracellular matrix.”
• Schweitzer’s discovery compares well with tissues from a modern ostrich bone, including the response of antibodies to the material.
• The soft tissue “may retain some of their original flexibility, elasticity, and resilience”. What Schweitzer showed on 60 minutes, eliciting a gasp from Lesley Stahl, was therefore not a trick.
• Parts of the “dinosaur protein 3D (quaternary) structure were still intact, able to bind to antibodies and similar in sequence to related proteins in modern birds.”

The reaction? “This 2005 paper and follow-up investigations were met with both excitement and scepticism across the sciences,” Wiemann writes. They didn’t want to believe it. They couldn’t imagine it. It seemed impossible.

Biochemists discussed whether protein fragments and their 3D structures could survive over such a long period of time, especially when they had been exposed to temperatures above 40 °C in the Hell Creek Formation that would be expected to cause protein degradation.

It was easier to just ignore this evidence.

Swayed by the discussion of experimental artefacts, microbial contamination and non-specific antibody binding, many withdrew from the dialogue on whether molecular material and soft tissue could survive through eras of geological time.

Dead dinosaurs do not bleed, everyone knows, but dinosaurs dead for 65 to 252 million years should not even have any soft tissue evidence left (blood or blood vessels) to show that they were capable of bleeding when alive.

Then the situation got worse. More reports came in from all directions.

During the past 20 years, cells, blood vessels, fibrous matrix and other features of soft tissue have been extracted by a number of independent groups applying Schweitzer and colleagues’ laboratory protocols to various types of ancient material. These include fossilized bone…, eggshell, teeth dentine, skin and feathers and invertebrate structural tissues. Preservation of organic material has also been observed in various fossil specimens, including wood, pollen, spores, early eukaryotes (single-celled or multicellular organisms with a nucleus) and even prokaryotes (single-celled organisms lacking a nucleus).

The creationists, meantime, were using these discoveries as prima facie evidence that the millions-of-years ages assigned to these fossils were fictional. The Darwinists were between a rock and a hard place. Was that the end of the story?

No. Just like the man who still thought he was dead after accepting the evidence that dead men do bleed, the Darwinists have accepted some evidence but hardened their stubborn hearts on another dogma: those preciousssss millions of yearzzzz that give them time for their silly stories to work. It goes like this: “Well, I’ll be! Dead dinosaurs can still keep original soft tissue after 65 to 252 million years!

Rescuing the Dogma

At this point in her article, Wiemann turns excited and confident. Scientists have figured out a way to keep these soft tissues old! They call it crosslinking.

Crosslinking fixes protein morphology in place, and the resulting polymers, which are rich in nitrogen-, oxygen- and sulfur-bearing molecular groups, have the potential to shield residual short-chained fragments of proteins (peptides), as well as their hydrolysis products, from degradation in fossils.

And so with a miraculous leap empowered by Darwin Flubber, Nature has given the Deep Time consensus a powerful new talking point. They can keep their precious millions of years and hold the creationists at bay, telling them they just don’t understand the science. Now they can use dinosaur soft tissue to teach them more about evolution. It’s like a coup.

With an emerging consensus about the mechanisms that drive biomolecule fossilization, a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists is now exploring the phylogenetic and physiological information in fossil organic matter. Current research centres around the survival potential of different molecular biosignatures under the pressure and temperature conditions that are relevant for fossilization, and the application of this information to previously intractable, big-picture questions on the rules governing the origin and evolution of life.

Wiemann suggests that they can even use dinosaur soft tissue to shed light on climate change and SETI.

Such mechanistic insights promise fresh solutions to pressing societal challenges that range from organic carbon capture and long-term storage, to biodiversity conservation informed by evolutionary models and the targeted search for traces of life beyond Earth.

With a swift parry, Weimann and Nature have put creationists on the defensive. It’s like the man who thinks he is dead pulling a fast one on the doctor, telling him, “OK, I admit the blood is real, but you still haven’t proved that I’m not dead.” Similarly, the evolutionists can now stand tall, point at the creationists, and say, “We have shown scientific evidence that protein molecules can hold hands by crosslinking. The dinosaur bones, therefore, are still 65 to 252 million years old.”

If the creationists complain that it is implausible to expect biomolecules to stay intact for millions of years, enduring annual summer heat over 104° F, and winter cold below freezing, and steady bombardment by cosmic rays, with inevitable millions of earthquakes and floods and climate swings in all that time, the Darwinist can sneer and respond, “What’s the matter with you? Do you lack imagination?”

This is why I call Deep Time the Law of the Misdeeds and Perversions, which cannot be altered. A Darwinist would rather die than give up his precious millionsssss of yearzzzz. Without Deep Time, Darwinism is dead. But walking dead men, remember, do bleed. Keep poking. Let the real crazy person repent before his imagination bleeds to death.