One interesting illustration of the problems in blindly relying on "established" scientific knowledge involves the recent discovery that soft matter--cartilage, skin, muscle tissue, etc.--may have been preserved in some actual dinosaur finds. Sounds crazy, right? Dinosaurs are millions of years old, and obviously soft tissue could not possibly last that long so it's just not possible. Dinosaurs are fossils. Rocks. After millions of years, nothing else but fossilized rock can remain. Science has spoken, and as we all should know, when science has spoken, the debate and the thinking are done. At least that's how some scientists apparently responded when Mary Higby Schweitzer, a woman and a known evangelical Christian, of all things, dared to claim that she had solid evidence for soft tissue from ancient dinosaurs. The woman is Mary Higby Schweitzer and her story is ably told by Barry Yeoman in "Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery," Discover Magazine, April 2006.
Schweitzer gazed through a microscope in her laboratory at North Carolina State University and saw lifelike tissue that had no business inhabiting a fossilized dinosaur skeleton: fibrous matrix, stretchy like a wet scab on human skin; what appeared to be supple bone cells, their three-dimensional shapes intact; and translucent blood vessels that looked as if they could have come straight from an ostrich at the zoo.This is a huge advance. What breathtaking finds are waiting to be revealed in the soft tissue and perhaps even the DNA of these ancient kings and queens of the planet? Hurray for Mary Higby Schweitzer and for her unusual background and her faith that helped her see things other scientists have probably been missing (and accidentally destroying) for decades.
By all the rules of paleontology, such traces of life should have long since drained from the bones. It's a matter of faith among scientists that soft tissue can survive at most for a few tens of thousands of years, not the 65 million since T. rex walked what's now the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. But Schweitzer tends to ignore such dogma. She just looks and wonders, pokes and prods, following her scientific curiosity. That has allowed her to see things other paleontologists have missed—and potentially to shatter fundamental assumptions about how much we can learn from the past. If biological tissue can last through the fossilization process, it could open a window through time, showing not just how extinct animals evolved but how they lived each day.
Mary is an evangelical Christian, but also accepts that the earth may be billions of years old (that fits my understanding of the evidence as well). There are other things about her I really like:
In 1989, while dividing her time between substitute teaching and her three children, Schweitzer steered back toward her childhood fascination with dinosaurs. She approached Jack Horner, a renowned dinosaur scientist, and asked if she could audit his vertebrate paleontology course at Montana State University. He appreciated her refreshingly nontraditional mind. "She really wasn't much of a scientist—which is good," says Horner, curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies. "Scientists all get to thinking alike, and it's good to bring people in from different disciplines. They ask questions very differently."Wow, right under their noses! Dinosaur finds at that site were well known to smell like cadavers. Dozens of soft tissue treasures had probably been destroyed over the years, with a treasure of information right under the offended noses of scientists. It took someone with a different perspective to dig into what was really there and reveal something tantalizing. Thank you, Mary Higby Schweitzer!
Schweitzer's first forays into paleontology were "a total hook," she says. Not only was she fascinated by the science, but to her, digging into ancient strata seemed like reading the history of God's handiwork. Schweitzer worships at two churches—an evangelical church in Montana and a nondenominational one when she is back home in North Carolina—and when she talks about her faith, her bristly demeanor falls away. "God is so multidimensional," she says. "I see a sense of humor. I see His compassion in the world around me. It makes me curious, because the creator is revealed in the creation." Unlike many creationists, she finds the notion of a world evolving over billions of years theologically exhilarating: "That makes God a lot bigger than thinking of Him as a magician that pulled everything out in one fell swoop."
Schweitzer's career began just as paleontologists started framing their own questions in more multidimensional ways. Until the 1980s, researchers were more likely to be trained in earth science than in biology. They often treated fossils as geologic specimens—mineral structures whose main value lay in showing the skeletal shapes of prehistoric animals. A younger generation of paleontologists, in contrast, has focused on reconstructing intimate details like growth rates and behaviors using modern techniques normally associated with the study of living organisms....
This shifting perspective clicked with Schweitzer's intuitions that dinosaur remains were more than chunks of stone. Once, when she was working with a T. rex skeleton harvested from Hell Creek, she noticed that the fossil exuded a distinctly organic odor. "It smelled just like one of the cadavers we had in the lab who had been treated with chemotherapy before he died," she says. Given the conventional wisdom that such fossils were made up entirely of minerals, Schweitzer was anxious when mentioning this to Horner. "But he said, 'Oh, yeah, all Hell Creek bones smell,'" she says. To most old-line paleontologists, the smell of death didn't even register. To Schweitzer, it meant that traces of life might still cling to those bones.
I also love her approach to science as something that teaches us more about the handiwork and, yes, humor of God. It is exhilarating.
Mary was lucky to have a supportive and open-minded mentor. Meanwhile, another evangelical Christian was allegedly fired from California State University, Northridge (CSUN) for publishing a peer-reviewed article in Acta Histochemia about his discovery of soft tissue on another dinosaur find, also at Hell Creek. Here is part of the story, as told by CBS Los Angeles:
Perhaps the problem may have been that he wasn't quiet about how this discovery supposedly supported his personal young-earth views. If his claims are correct, it was unfortunate and not a very scientific thing for the university to do. Not surprisingly, scientists and university leaders are humans like everyone else and bring plenty of biases with them in their quest for truth and funding. Sadly, some university systems have become remarkably intolerant of diverging views and enforce uniformity of thought much more than they let on in their P.R. Some pretty extreme abuses happen from time to time. I'm glad Mary Schweitzer's work was able to move forward and shake things up for the good of all of us.While at the Hell Creek Formation excavation site in Montana, researcher Mark Armitage discovered what he believed to be the largest triceratops horn ever unearthed at the site, according to attorney Brad Dacus of Pacific Justice Institute.Upon examination of the horn under a high-powered microscope back at CSUN, Dacus says Armitage was “fascinated” to find soft tissue on the sample – a discovery Bacus said stunned members of the school’s biology department and even some students “because it indicates that dinosaurs roamed the earth only thousands of years in the past rather than going extinct 60 million years ago.”“Since some creationists, like [Armitage], believe that the triceratops bones are only 4,000 years old at most, [Armitage's] work vindicated his view that these dinosaurs roamed the planet relatively recently,”according to the complaint (PDF) filed July 22 in Los Angeles Superior Court.The lawsuit against the CSUN board of trustees cites discrimination for perceived religious views.Armitage’s findings were eventually published in July 2013 in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.According to court documents, shortly after the original soft tissue discovery, a CSUN official told Armitage, “We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department!”Armitage, a published scientist of over 30 years, was subsequently let go after CSUN abruptly claimed his appointment at the university of 38 months had been temporary, and claimed a lack of funding for his position, according to attorneys.
By the way, other scientists think they have an answer for how soft tissue could be preserved so long. Turns out iron nanoparticles might be doing the trick. They seem to have done well in preserving soft tissue during a two-year period already. Just another 50 million years or so before we'll be sure.
Related stories: GodfatherPolitics.com discusses some of the initially negative reactions Mary received for her work.
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