Ken Ham is excited about another discovery of traces of collagen in dinosaur bones. Me? I’m saying ho-hum, it’s mildly interesting, but it’s not what you think it is. Kenny-boy thinks it’s evidence that the bones are only 4,000 years old. I’m just wondering what processes protected collagen from degradation.
In this new study, researchers* used advanced mass spectrometry and protein sequencing to detect bone collagen in a well-preserved hip bone from an Edmontosaurus uncovered in the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. This unexpected find is encouraging other researchers to pull fossils out of storage and look at them with these new technologies. And why?
The popular science article explains:
Furthermore, experts could uncover the biochemical pathways that enabled the preservation of organic compounds over millions of years. “The findings inform the intriguing mystery of how these proteins have managed to persist in fossils for so long,” said Taylor.
Yes, how these proteins could remain for millions of years is a big mystery. Evolutionists, try as they might, have yet to be able to present a plausible explanation for the existence of soft tissue in supposedly ancient fossils. Now the popular science article quoted Dr. Taylor, who is a creation scientist involved with this new find, saying this research will help us understand how proteins can last for “so long”—creationists too want to know how proteins can last a few thousand years. We don’t have the problem of millions and millions of years but there’s more work to be done to understand the processes that preserved them since the flood, 4,350 years ago.
The original paper doesn’t ask the question Ken Ham thinks it does. It has a narrow, specific scope: is the collagen part of the bone, or is it a product of external contamination? They show that it really is in the fossil.
They say nothing about the age of the fossil, except to briefly acknowledge it was “excavated from the Upper Cretaceous zone of the Hell Creek Formation in Harding County, South Dakota, USA.” They don’t dwell on that fact (it’s not the focus of the paper), but I know that there’s a huge amount of data screaming that it is 70 million years old. Any explanation for the preservation of soft tissue has to include all those facts. You know, the facts that Ham ignores.
Collagen is there. I’m willing to accept that. The bones are 70 million years old. The science demonstrates that. And we have plausible explanations for its preservation.
We previously demonstrated that the treatment of extant microvascular tissue with haemoglobin, an Fe-coordinating protein, can significantly enhance stability over multi-year time frames10, in effect acting as a preserving agent. Here, we extend this experimental observation to propose that enhanced resistance to degradation is due in part to Fe-catalysed non-enzymatic crosslinking of molecules comprising structural tissues, with haemoglobin suggested as the primary source of such Fe in vessels undergoing diagenesis.
This is just another example of Answers in Genesis cherry-picking the data they like and then misinterpreting/misrepresenting it.
Finding very old tissue? I think this is the plot from “Quatermass And the Pit”.
@ 1
Was that before of after Satan appears as a giant mantis and kaijus London?
I’ll have to read the paper to make an intelligent comment, but if collagen is preserved, why are the bones fossilized? As a comic book fan, Dr. Myers, you may remember the Silver Age Superboy comics featuring his dog Krypto digging up and munching on dinosaur bones. Maybe Ken Ham could also use that as justification for his beliefs.
Shorter version of Analytical Chemistry article:
There Will Be Blood …
… doing the crosslinking stabilization of collagen remnants.
🫀
Any god worth his salt could prove his existence by sticking his head through the clouds and yelling, “yo, I’m here.” But Ken Ham’s god sticks a few traces of collagen onto some dinosaur bones.
I’m underwhelmed.
Ken Ham the evolution denier who looked like a macaque when he was younger , right!
That which cannot be immediately explained and require further detailed study can only be attributed to mythical beings, who, themselves, cannot be explained.
AFAIK these “soft” tissues were actually mineralized. Only after the minerals are dissolved away does one find some residues that appear to be soft tissues such as blood vessels or blood cells.. Once something is hermetically sealed, it can last indefinately. That’s how the tissues were preserved.The only question is how did the soft tissues last long enough to be mineralized, I am guessing tens of years, thousands at most. It’s processes of fossilization that are at issue, not the age of the earth!
Is there fossilized soft tissue inside Ken Ham’s skull?
submoron @ #9 — “Is there fossilized soft tissue inside Ken Ham’s skull?” Nope. It all rotted away. He doesn’t even have a single fossilized brain cell.
Ted Lawry at 8,
The paper does not (in its abstract, at least) use the term “soft tissue”, which usually refers to non-mineralized animal tissues. Bone tissue is “hard” in life because it largely consists of mineral accretion, but it also contains living cells made of biomolecules, and bones as body parts also contain canals filled with soft tissue (blood vessels and marrow).
A few remnant biomolecules in a fossil is not “soft tissue”, regardless of whether it was derived from bone or actual soft tissue. Ham is perhaps deliberately using confusing language, because fossils often contain morphological traces of soft tissues or soft body parts, less often chemical traces of biomolecules.
Akira MacKenzie @ 2
No, first Spiney Norman the giant hedgehog goes on a rampage.
But it is the ‘black goo’ that you really need to watch out for. It made both the Alien and the Engineers.
Interesting asterisk there. Apparently two of the authors on the paper are, according to Ham, creation scientists. Brian Thomas and Stephen Taylor. If this paper has two creationists on the author list, how come nothing in the paper is in defense of creationism?
So now we “know” the Flood occurred circa 2325 BCE – has Ham ever gotten so precise before?
I wonder whether the “Seated Scribe” depicted in a famous Egyptian engraving from that period (approximately the end of the Fifth Dynasty at latest) wrote anything about it…
Yay! The paper is open access.
weylguy@3– The fossil is throroughly mineralised and no actual tissue was preserved. The main finding is that degradation fragments of collagen can be identified within the mineralised material. The research target was bone, not soft tissue, specifically the exceptionally well-preserved sacrum of an Edmontosaurus. Bone is a collagen matrix mineralised with calcium, so it is a good place to look for traces of collagen. Collagen is a robust molecule, the building block of all connective tissue, so collagen is a good choice to look for remnant proteins.
As well as collagen fragments, the authors found “over a hundred actin peptides” as well as “61 hemoglobin, 158 histone, and 92 tubulin peptides.” The finding surprised me when PZ reported it because I had assumed that proteins would degrade over 65+ My to the point nothing would be left. But thinking about it, protein doesn’t evaporate into the ether, it degrades by breaking into subcomponents, and I should have expected a few short protein chains (i.e. peptides) to remain.
The paper’s introductory section makes it clear there has been a lot of evidence accumulating for this over recent years. My surprise arose from unfamiliarity with the research base and I was delighted to overturn my previous misunderstanding on the basis of this paper. Ham, of course, relies on surprise from ignorance to maintain anti-evidentiary beliefs, for instance that the Upper Cretaceous was only a few thousand years ago.
Impressive find but can they extract some DNA from this and start recreating it Jurassic park style?
(I know, no, but live in hope.)
Well, the more you look, the more you see. But then it gets complicated and Ken(t) doesn’t do complicated. Taxes are complicated.Structuring is complicated.
This is no different than creationists jumping to conclusions while stupidly “celebrating” the discovery of microscopic fossilized “blood cells” found inside of a 75 million year old tyrannosaurus fossil by Mary Schweitzer years ago. To them, the fossil debunks the factual notion of the fossil being “millions of years old” because Mary ended up finding fossil tissues she can easily squeeze out of the bone marrow… or so they “believe.” Never mind that the tissues were microscopic and not at all what the idiots claim to be.
Prof Schweitzer has a new Open Access paper out that cites the above.
Schweitzer, M.H., Zheng, W., Dickinson, E. et al. Taphonomic variation in vascular remains from Mesozoic non-avian dinosaurs. Sci Rep 15, 4359 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-85497-y
I note that, unlike the above, they are not shy about specifically referencing millions of years:
Y’know, the ACS paper tested Edmontosaurus against turkey bone. That is utterly conventional according to evolution — turkeys are dinosaurs — but what’s the reasoning for a creationist? Tacitly acknowledging evolution?
Here’s the corresponding author’s page on AIG:
https://answersingenesis.org/bios/steve-taylor/
<headdesk>
How many tens of dollars did doi.org want for this particular article?
<smh>
The question above is so confused I cannot tell if it is asked facetiously or not.
… says the confused one.