Soft Tissues or Not?

When browsing for some fun recent science discovery, I came across an example of willful and slightly gleeful ignorance of the scientific process. The line was a common argument made by those who disregard scientific finds as poppycock. Paraphrasing it goes something like such: "Scientists have had to change their story so many times it's ridiculous! How can they still go along with this clearly made up story?" When this is encountered, you know that the person who said it just cannot be shown their ineptitude at logic. To answer this quickly, science changes with the data because science is striving to understand the world, when doing so they create hypotheses, which then get tested and a few go so far as to become theories. It is at this point scientists can then predict further findings in natural terms without the use o throwing up our hands and claiming magic was behind it.

The story I was reading about when I found this was about supposed soft tissues found in fossils over 65 MYA. This isn't really a new story, but I wanted to see if there was more about it, and as it turns out there is that was completely looked over by those exposing their ignorance.

It was long thought that soft tissues would become completely fossilized with in a few thousand years or so. Then in 2005 a paper by Mary Schweitzer found what appeared to be blood vessels with blood cells still in them. This was unprecedented, especially when considering the detail seen in the blood vessels (nuclei still present, showing probable relatedness to birds). This could have caused a paradigm shift in paleontology as DNA may actually be available for certain specimens in the fossil record giving us a better idea of what dinosaurs may have been really like. Questions like if they were warm-blooded or poikilothermic, or what color they were (although this can be determined now with analysis of pigments remaining is certain fossil finds). So yeah, kind of important find.

So the person claiming science as invalid used this as evidence for a young earth model of the universe (note: not an accepted model by scientists). This clearly shows that these fossils were buried much more recently than the scientific community claimed, they though. However science continued to give predictions as to how this could have occurred, and the paper I will discuss actually purports that these findings are results of bacterial biofilms found in the fossils.

This finding suggests that biofilms were actually the culprit for the seen results of blood, as they mimic osteocytes and blood vessels when bacteria are dissolved away. So this begs the question what is a biofilm? To get a rough idea, think if you put water into a glass and left it there for a while, algae would then grow in it yes?  Then remove the water and dissolve the glass without harming the algae, the film of algae would resemble the outline of the glass it was in. Well this is what the biofilm is acting like. Further, when testing the date of these biofilms, they found it dated back to the mid 1900's.... (I don't think even the young earther's could claim dinosaurs were around 50 years ago.) This would indicate that no, sadly the original findings were indeed not osteocytes or blood vessels. However this does not mean that soft tissue does not exist in fossils, it still may be out there.

Back to the original comment of scientific lacking, it makes me tristful that the commenter never thought to get the whole story. I do realize though, that if they had read it they would have(one would hope) understand a bit better the scientific process. When a paper gets published, it is torn to bits by colleagues to try and discredit the paper, because when torn apart, other studies will be warranted thus expanding our knowledge in the process. Also we can try to get closer to the truth of how our reality truly behaves. Taking a line from Matt Dillahunty, "I want to believe in as few falsities, and as many truths as I can."

When reading scientific studies remember to dive deeper and read critiques of the studies, or just make sure the study was conducted properly (unlike the recent arsenic paper from NASA).

Original papers -
Soft Tissues in Cretaceous Skeleton
Biofilms Responsible for Soft Tissue Findings